Cape Town road users can soon receive, pay for fines via SMS

Great news, everyone. The City of Cape Town is trying to make SMS technology relevant again.

The City’s Safety and Security mayoral representative JP Smith has today announced that Cape Town motorists will soon be able to pay road fines using “smart SMS technology”.

“The City of Cape Town’s Traffic Service is adding another technological advancement to its arsenal with the roll-out of smart SMS technology that will allow motorists to pay fines via their cellphones, tablets or personal computers,” he says in a statement.

Smith also states that users will be sent SMSes of pending fines, negating the need for South Africa’s tardy and often unreliable postal system.

Although users can’t exactly pay for the fine received using an SMS, the SMSes sent containing fines will include a link to the City’s fine payment portal. The portal includes options to download the fine as a PDF, email the fine to a mailing address, and pay using “debit, credit card or online.”

So effectively, it’s more like a smart notification.

Smith is sure to note that this system doesn’t replace the other methods of fine payment, but merely adds to them. And thanks to the prehistoric SMS tech used, it works on practically any phone with an internet connection — from Android to the likes of Symbian.

The website seems simple enough for even the most under-powered device to use, so there shouldn’t be much of an issue there. Although the system doesn’t seem to be active at the time of writing, you can test the system whilst pretending to be MR SPEEDER.