In China, you can now pay your speeding tickets with a smartphone

Original photo credit: Hugo90

If you’re a speed demon in China, you hate the feeling of looking into your rearview mirror and seeing that. But now there’s some good news: an app won’t be able to get you out of that ticket, but it will help you pay the fine quickly so that you can get back out on the open road.

The app in question is one most drivers in China likely already have on their phones: Alipay. Alibaba’s epayment app announced recently that it has teamed up with 163 cities across 24 of China’s provinces to offer drivers a number of services like easy access to local driving regulations. That’s not so exciting, but in nearly half of those cities Alipay will also support epayments for tickets and other traffic related fines.

One city, Ningbo, has already had this system in place for a couple months now. It has helped police to verify the real-name identities of over 600,000 drivers, and it has helped those lawbreaking drivers pay out about 3,000 traffic fines each day. Paying a fine takes an Alipay user about ten seconds; compare that to the 30 or more minutes it might take to pay a fine in person. So far, it has saved Ningbo’s drivers (and the government that doesn’t have to manage their lines) about ten years of time.

So yes, the future is here, and yes, in the future speeding is still illegal. But at least now you’re only going to be slowed down by the law, not by an inconvenient jumble of red tape, so you can pay your fine before you’ve even turned to get back onto the road.