You'll soon be able to use your phone as a metro ticket
flickr: Timmy_L
Constantly losing your public transportation card or tired of scrambling to find enough change to buy a ticket? The Shanghai Metro sees you and the Shanghai Metro feels you, as soon you should be able to ditch tickets all together in favour of using your mobile phone.
According to Shanghai Metro Club's Weibo news last week, a new scanning code has been installed in the city's stations' ticket reader machines that will allow passengers to scan to gain entry. It hasn't been revealed exactly when this new technology will be launched, but it is set to be available at every metro/maglev station across Shanghai.
So how does this new technology work? As with a lot of modern day mobile tech, it's pretty simple. Metro大都会, a Shanghai-based metro ticketing and information app is in cooperation with Alipay and Union Pay to launch a mobile pay service. So, all you need to do is to download the Metro大都会 app, connect it to your Alipay and/or Union Pay accounts, scan the code on the metro station's ticket reader machine, then there you go, you are in the station. Easy peasy.