Distracted pedestrians stumble into danger

JOAN LOWY

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — A young man talk­ing on a cell­phone mean­ders along the edge of a lonely train plat­form at night. Sud­denly he stum­bles, loses his bal­ance and pitches over the side, land­ing head first on the tracks.

For­tu­nately there were no trains approach­ing the Philadelphia-area sta­tion at that moment, because it took the man sev­eral min­utes to recover enough to climb out of dan­ger. But the inci­dent, cap­tured last year by a secu­rity cam­era and pro­vided to The Asso­ci­ated Press, under­scores the risks of what gov­ern­ment offi­cials and safety experts say is a grow­ing prob­lem: dis­tracted walking.

On city streets, in sub­ur­ban park­ing lots and in shop­ping cen­ters, there is usu­ally some­one strolling while talk­ing on a phone, tex­ting with his head down, lis­ten­ing to music, or play­ing a video game. The prob­lem isn’t as widely dis­cussed as dis­tracted dri­ving, but the dan­ger is real.

Reports of injuries to dis­tracted walk­ers treated at hos­pi­tal emer­gency rooms have more than quadru­pled in the past seven years and are almost cer­tainly under­re­ported. There has been a spike in pedes­tri­ans killed and injured in traf­fic acci­dents, but there is no reli­able data on how many were dis­tracted by electronics.

“We are where we were with cell­phone use in cars 10 years or so ago. We knew it was a prob­lem, but we didn’t have the data,” said Jonathan Akins, deputy exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Gov­er­nors High­way Safety Asso­ci­a­tion, which rep­re­sents state high­way safety offices.

State and local offi­cials are strug­gling to fig­ure out how to respond, and in some cases ask­ing how far gov­ern­ment should go in try­ing to pro­tect peo­ple from themselves.

In Delaware, high­way safety offi­cials opted for a pub­lic edu­ca­tion cam­paign, plac­ing decals on cross­walks and side­walks at busy inter­sec­tions urg­ing pedes­tri­ans to “Look up. Dri­vers aren’t always look­ing out for you.”

Philadel­phia offi­cials are draft­ing a safety cam­paign that will be aimed in part at pedes­tri­ans who are look­ing at their devices instead of where they’re going. “One of the mes­sages will cer­tainly be ‘pick your head up’ — I want to say ‘nitwit,’ but I prob­a­bly shouldn’t call them names,” said Rina Cut­ler, deputy mayor for trans­porta­tion and pub­lic utilities.

As an April Fool’s Day joke with a seri­ous mes­sage, Philadel­phia offi­cials taped off an “e-lane” for dis­tracted pedes­tri­ans on a side­walk out­side down­town office buildings.

Some didn’t get that it was a joke.

“The sad part is we had peo­ple who, once they real­ized we were going to take the e-lane away, got mad because they thought it was really help­ful to not have peo­ple get in their way while they were walk­ing and tex­ting,” Cut­ler said.

When the Utah Tran­sit Author­ity adopted an ordi­nance bar­ring pedes­tri­ans from using cell­phones, head­phones or other dis­tract­ing elec­tronic devices while cross­ing the tracks of its light rail sys­tem on the streets of Salt Lake City, sub­ject to a $50 fine, the Leg­is­la­ture refused to make it a statewide law.

“Look, I get dis­tracted all the time,” bris­tled Utah State Rep. Craig Frank, a Repub­li­can who opposed the pro­posal. “I have a smart­phone, too. Walk­ing on side­walks, in stores and malls, and maybe in a cross­walk some­times I’m using my cell­phone. But I try to stay con­nected to my envi­ron­ment. I never thought the gov­ern­ment needed to cite me for using my cell­phone in a rea­son­able manner.”

Dis­tracted walk­ing bills in the Arkansas, Illi­nois and New York leg­is­la­tures also went nowhere.

The South­east­ern Penn­syl­va­nia Trans­porta­tion Author­ity, which pro­vided the video of the man who fell onto the train tracks, has received reports from bus dri­vers and train engi­neers who say they nearly hit pedes­tri­ans who didn’t appear to hear them sound their horns because they were dis­tracted by their elec­tronic devices, said Jim Fox, the agency’s direc­tor of sys­tem safety and risk management.

He said there have been sev­eral cases of peo­ple hit and killed by the authority’s trains in which it appears they were wear­ing head­phones or using cell­phones while tres­pass­ing on tracks.

A Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land study found 116 cases over six years in which pedes­tri­ans were killed or seri­ously injured while wear­ing head­phones. In two-thirds of the cases the vic­tims were men under age 30. Half the cases involved trains. In a third of the inci­dents, a warn­ing horn was sounded just before the accident.

“With the smart­phone tech­nol­ogy these days and every­thing at your fin­ger­tips, it’s almost get­ting to be an obses­sion or a com­pul­sion with peo­ple,” Fox said. “You see it in air­ports or train sta­tions or malls — if there’s any kind of down­time, they’re jump­ing right to that phone.”

About 1,152 peo­ple were treated in hos­pi­tal emer­gency rooms in the U.S. last year for injuries suf­fered while walk­ing and using a cell­phone or some other elec­tronic device, accord­ing to the Con­sumer Prod­uct Safety Com­mis­sion, which receives annual data from 100 emer­gency rooms and extrap­o­lates the infor­ma­tion into a national esti­mate. But that’s likely an under­es­ti­mate because patients may not men­tion they were using a cell­phone or other device at the time at the time they were injured, or the doc­tor or nurse may neglect to include the infor­ma­tion in their report, said Tom Schroeder, direc­tor of the commission’s data systems.

The cases include a 24-year-old woman who walked into a tele­phone pole while tex­ting; a 28-year-old man who was walk­ing along a road when he fell into a ditch while talk­ing on a cell­phone; a 12-year-old boy who was look­ing at a video game when he was clipped by a pickup truck as he crossed the street; and a 53-year-old woman who fell off a curb while tex­ting and lac­er­ated her face.

One 67-year-old man walk­ing along the side of a road was hit a by a bicy­clist who was talk­ing on a cell­phone as he rode. The pedes­trian injured a knee.

Though over­all traf­fic deaths were lower in 2010 than the year before, pedes­trian fatal­i­ties rose by 4.2 per­cent and injuries by 19 per­cent, accord­ing to the lat­est data avail­able from the National High­way Traf­fic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion. It’s not clear how many of the pedes­trian deaths and injuries involved cell­phones and other elec­tron­ics because police often don’t col­lect that information.

Even with­out bet­ter data, the Inter­net yields a wealth of anec­do­tal evi­dence of the power of elec­tron­ics to dis­tract pedestrians.

A woman tex­ting while she walked through in a sub­ur­ban Philadel­phia shop­ping mall this year tum­bled into a large foun­tain directly in front of her. Secu­rity cam­era video of the inci­dent went viral, gen­er­at­ing mil­lions of hits.

A man tex­ting a mes­sage to his boss nearly strolled into the path of a black bear that had wan­dered into a sub­ur­ban Los Ange­les neigh­bor­hood. He was only a few feet away when he looked up, saw the bear, and ran. A KTLA news heli­copter track­ing the bear recorded the April incident.

Researchers say they’re not sur­prised that multi-tasking pedes­tri­ans run into trouble.

Psy­cho­log­i­cal stud­ies that show most peo­ple can’t focus on two things at once. Rather, their atten­tion shifts rapidly back and forth between tasks, and per­for­mance suf­fers. But like a lot of dri­vers who use cell­phones behind the wheel, pedes­tri­ans often think they’re in con­trol and that it’s all the other fools on their phones who aren’t watch­ing what they’re doing.

“I see stu­dents as soon as they break from a class, they have their cell­phones out and they’re tex­ting to one another. They’re walk­ing through the door and bump­ing into one another,” said Jack Nasar, an Ohio State Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor and expert on envi­ron­men­tal psy­chol­ogy. “Peo­ple think they can do it, that they are some­how better.”

A study Nasar con­ducted at inter­sec­tions on cam­pus found that peo­ple talk­ing on cell­phones were sig­nif­i­cantly more likely to walk in front of cars than pedes­tri­ans not using phones.

A study by researchers at Stony Brook Uni­ver­sity in New York com­pared the per­for­mance of peo­ple asked to walk across a room to a tar­get — a piece of paper taped to the floor — with­out dis­trac­tions and then again next day while talk­ing on a cell­phone or tex­ting. The group that talked on the cell­phone walked slightly slower and veered off course a bit more than pre­vi­ously, but the tex­ting group walked slower, veered off course 61 per­cent more and over­shot the tar­get 13 per­cent more.

“Peo­ple really need to be aware that they are impact­ing their safety by tex­ting or talk­ing on the cell­phone” while walk­ing, Eric Lam­berg, an asso­ciate phys­i­cal ther­apy pro­fes­sor who con­ducted the study, said. “I think the risk is there.”

Posted by AP News on Jul 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.