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Cellphones and Crosswalks: A Hazardous Mix – New York Times - Roni Caryn Rabin Aug. 2, 2018 Texting or talking on the phone affects our walking speed and gait and can increase the risk of serious injury. Pedestrians who are using their phones cross the street at a slower pace than others, a new study has found, a behavior that may increase their risk of being hit by a car. Regardless of whether they’re talking on the phone or texting, distracted pedestrians using phones take smaller steps and walk in a more erratic fashion when crossing the street than those who aren’t on their phones, the study found. Researchers used a system of automated video analysis to examine the movements of 357 pedestrians crossing a busy four-way intersection near a university in Kamloops, British Columbia, over the course of two days of good weather in April, 2016. Nearly 38 percent of the pedestrians were using their cellphones while crossing the street, with most of them texting or reading. The paper was published in Transportation Research Record. Crossing a street slowly increases the risk to a pedestrian, said Tarek Sayed, the paper’s senior author and a professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “The longer you are in the crosswalk, the longer you are exposed to potential conflicts and collisions,” he said. Texting also takes cognitive effort and limits visual sensory input, which can impair balance and lead to falls, he said. Dr. Sayed’s advice for people who cross the street while talking or texting was simple: “Don’t do it.” A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 7, 2018, Section D, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Saftey: Phones, Crosswalks and Danger. ===============================
What interested me the most in The Times this week was an article called “Cellphones and Crosswalks A Hazardous Mix”, because I’ve seen the outcome of this problem in person. This article discusses different reasons why walking while using a cellphone isn’t safe. My personal experience with this happened one day last summer while I was waiting for someone at a train station. A guy looking down at his cell phone, wearing headphones and dancing while walking was approaching the train crossing intersection. Even though the signals were blinking and the alert bells were ringing, I watched as the man walked right in front of an oncoming train. Apparently, his music was so loud that he couldn’t pay enough attention to his surroundings to see or hear the train coming. In the article a doctor, named Dr. Sayed, says that walking in a crossway while on your cell phone helps to unbalance your focus on the road and slows you down. With that said, the slower you are, the greater the chance you’ll get hit. Dr. Sayed did an experiment with 357 pedestrians and found that 38 percent were on their cellphones or reading a book while crossing the street. The article connects to what I experienced because it shows that it can happen anywhere and anytime. Which also leads to my final conclusion that I completely agree with the article in a sense that phones should not be used in a crossway for safety reasons. |
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