A district tourism bureau has launched a pilot program that allows tourists to check the accident and inspection history of their tour buses with their mobile phones, the Oriental Morning Post reported Thursday.

The program's goal is help reduce the number of bus-related accidents and boost the confidence of tourists in tour buses.

"Passengers can check if their tour bus was involved in any accidents over the last 18 months and find out whether it passed its annual vehicle inspections," said Huang Shengdong, deputy director of the Hongkou Tourism Bureau. "It is an efficient way for tourists to find out if they are boarding a safe vehicle."

The bureau began the pilot program with a travel agency in mid-August. For the program, the agency had all of its tour buses display a matrix code, which is a block of two-dimensional shapes that functions like a bar code, on their windshields, Huang said. Passengers can scan the code with their smart phones to retrieve the information.

Roughly 15 percent of local traffic fatalities involve long-distance or tour buses, according to statistics that the Shanghai Municipal Transport and Port Authority released last week. A total of 559 people have died in 1,394 traffic accidents in the city this year, up 5 percent from last year. 

Huang said it is another measure to ensure tourist safety. The local transportation authority upgraded the cameras and global positioning systems (GPS) on Shanghai's long-distance and tour buses in June.

Mei Yuan, the operations manager of Shanghai Modern International Travel Agency, which joined the pilot program, said that the matrix code will help boost their image as a reliable agency. "Many passengers worry that the tour buses that travel agencies provide are unsafe," he told the Global Times.

The Hongkou tourism bureau has been working with  the Shanghai Tourism Bureau and hope the new measure can be implemented citywide in the beginning of 2013. "We need to solve technical issues related to the matrix-code system before this can start citywide," Huang told the Global Times.