Three recent cases illustrate just how distracting our cellphones have become. In Australia last December, a woman became so engrossed in checking her Facebook posts that she walked off the pier she was on and fell straight into the sea. A video on YouTube that has gone viral shows a young woman falling into a fountain at a mall because she was engrossed in looking at her cellphone screen. Then there?s the case of 25-year-old Tiffany Briggs in Florida. She was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone and, lost in conversation, she ran into a truck. What makes the story so distracting is that the truck was not being driven. It was parked in the owner?s driveway. Till now, most news items and research on the subject have been related to cellphone use while driving and the connection with accidents. Now, it appears that even pedestrians are not safe from the perils of distraction.
The Pew Research Center has been conducting surveys on the pedestrian distraction problem and found that 23% of cellphone owners have physically bumped into another person or object because they were distracted by using their phone. This, according to PEW, is a statistically significant increase from the 17% of cellphone owners who said this had happened to them in an earlier survey done in May 2010. The bump, or jump, in figures is interesting because PEW also found that 50% of cell owners say they have been bumped into by another person because that person was distracted by the use of their own cellphone. Taken together, that works out to 53% of all adult cell owners who have been on either the giving or receiving end of a ?distracted walking? encounter, says a PEW paper. Young adults, especially those between ages 18 and 24, are especially prone to experience ?distracted walking? encounters. According to PEW, half of these young cell owners (51%) have bumped into a person or object because they were busy paying attention to their phone, and 70% have been bumped into by another person who was distracted by using their own cellphone.
The common factor is that urban residents are naturally more prone to these close encounters, but the other interesting finding is that in addition to age, the type of phone people own and how they use that device, is strongly connected to this distractive behaviour. Some 32% of smartphone owners have run into someone or something because they were distracted by using their phone, compared with 14% of non-smartphone owners. Smartphones offer users a much broader experience and online access to social media, leading to near addiction to the device. In fact, the PEW study also found that people who use their phones fairly intensively are prone to these collisions. For example, some 37% of cell owners who go online using their cellphone have bumped into someone or something. Another survey conducted in America, the country with the most cellphones as percentage of population, found that over 1,500 pedestrians were estimated to be treated in emergency rooms for injuries related to using a cellphone while walking, over a 12-month period. This is double the figure recorded two years earlier. Researchers believe that the number of pedestrians injured badly enough to be taken to hospital due to cellphone usage is actually much higher. Clearly, the age of the mobile gadget is making mobility that much more dangerous, particularly on crowded streets and in areas where multi-taskers walk to the beat of their handheld device.