Texting While Walking Isn’t Funny Anymore

The Wall Street Journal:

Manny Fiori’s job is to make sure your phone doesn’t kill you. He guards the entrance to a garage near my San Francisco office and stops cars from hitting pedestrians so engrossed in screens they don’t notice they’re stepping into traffic.

“People are so oblivious nowadays,” says Mr. Fiori, a building employee who barks orders and even holds out his arms to stop both cars and people.

Watching the morning rush from his driveway is a scary measure of our smartphone addiction. In one hour last week, we tallied 70 pedestrians who never looked up—some watching TV shows, many grimacing while pounding out emails. Five of them can thank Mr. Fiori for preventing them from colliding into cars.

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I crunched data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission and discovered that emergency room visits involving distracted pedestrians using cellphones were up 124% in 2014 from 2010—and up 10-fold from 2006. The increase was consistent with an analysis by Jack Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University, who found a big uptick in cases between 2005 and 2010.

Some researchers now blame portable electronic gadgets for 10% of pedestrian injuries, and a half-dozen deaths a year. While distracted driving leads to more severe harm, incidents involving texting walkers are more common.

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Even the strong-willed are susceptible to a buzzing gadget, perfectly crafted to reward our brains’ desire to find new things and be social. Just see how long you can ignore an incoming text.

“This is FOMO—the fear of missing out,” says Paul Atchley, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas. Smartphones are “trying to hijack your attention.”

Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal