How many times have you come close to injuring yourself while on your smartphone? The answer for most of us would be "more times than I care to remember". Strolling down the street never used to require medical assistance, but thanks to the rise of technology, things are now a little different. Thousands of us almost - but not quite - get mowed down by cars, step into bicycles and bump into unsuspecting passers-by on a regular basis, and the truth is, we're reaching new lows with every passing day.
Take a peek in your local newsagents - or perhaps just look at the news on your smartphone since you love it so much - and you'll see that newspapers publish utterly ridiculous headlines like "Man looking at electronic device falls off cliff and dies" and "Woman Obsessed with Her Mobile Phone Gets Hit by Car". Not to mention those ones with that additional preposterous edge like "Man Crushed to Death While Looking for Lost Phone in Trash Compactor".
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We've always heard about how smartphones are affecting our sleep, damaging our spines and making us more antisocial, the thing we don't hear so much about is about how we keep hurting ourselves physically. More than 11,000 injuries resulted from phone-related distraction while walking in the United States between 2000 and 2011, with talking on the phone the most prevalent activity at the time of injury and texting responsible for 12 per cent of the damage. Nearly 80 per cent of the injuries occurred as the result of a fall, while 9 per cent occurred from the pedestrian striking a motionless object, with the most common injury types including dislocations or fractures, sprains or strains and concussions or contusions.
And that's not the worst of it! With the number of mobile phone users in the world expected to pass the five billion mark by 2019, experts have predicted that the total injury toll from "distracted walking" will have risen by thousands in the space of a few years. Already we know from a report from the Governors Highway Safety Association that the number of pedestrians killed in traffic soared by 11 per cent in 2016. Not to mention that a new word has been introduced for people who walk and text: take a good look in the mirror, because you just became a pedextrian.
So, how is the pedextrian crisis to be averted? There have been many proposed, tried and tested solutions across the world. The methods started off lighthearted enough, with authorities obviously hoping they wouldn't have to take serious action in order to convince people to look up. Spoiler: they were wrong.
In 2012, Philadelphia officials thought they had struck gold with an ingenious April Fool's joke, deciding to tape off an "e-lane" for distracted pedestrians on a sidewalk outside downtown office buildings. However, not everyone got the 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," Rina Cutler, deputy mayor for transportation and public utilities, said at the time.
Then, two years later, things got real when Chongqing in China designated a 30-metre cellphone lane for people who used their phones while walking. This time, it wasn't a joke; it was a genuine pilot scheme designed to assist in solving a serious public issue. The Belgium city of Antwerp followed one year later with their very own smartphone lane, and smartphone zombies were helped out yet again in 2016 when a ridiculous new app called Look Up was created for the purpose of reminding people to avert their eyes from their smartphones while out and about.
However, with a study at Ohio State University finding that distracted walking injuries in the US were rising fast, with 1,506 recorded in US emergency rooms in 2010, up from 256 in 2005, there were about to be serious consequences for distracted walkers. In 2017, the Hawaiian city of Honolulu resorted to fining people up to $99 for failing to look up from their phones when they are crossing the road.
The new law gives police the power to fine people up to $35 for their first offence, $75 for their second and $99 thereafter, hitting people where it hurts in order to get them to listen up. In addition, there has been discussion that walking and texting could carry up to 15 days imprisonment in the state of New Jersey, but this is yet to have been passed.
Getting confined to a cell for two weeks might sound like a crazy punishment for merely checking out your favourite celebrity's latest Instagram post, but it seems that these penalties are what authorities are willing to resort to in order to stop the rise of smartphone zombie injuries and deaths. If you really think about it, the ever-rising number of incidents just exemplifies the idea that our smartphone obsession has gone too far and the fact that you could potentially be locked up soon for being on your phone should be a wake-up call for all of the addicts out there.
