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(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.
I’m hardly innocent. My phone bears scars that look like I got in a fight with a bobcat—actually, I walked into a wall while texting.
Swedish designers Jacob Sempler and Emil Tiismann installed signs around Stockholm last November, warning drivers of distracted pedestrians.PHOTO:JACOB SEMPLER
It was sort of a joke when the distracted pedestrian phenomenon first arrived, right? YouTube is filled with highlight reels of texters falling into fountains. The Germans have a word for such people: smombie—smartphone plus zombie.
But as we reach a point where garages have to hire guards to save us from ourselves, texting while walking is no longer a joke.
It’s a public safety conundrum, and a symptom of an addiction. At the very least, it’s a design failure in smartphones that have mastered how—but not when—to get our attention. It’s time to ask what responsibility the tech industry has to address the problem.
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.
“We aren’t talking about bumps and bruises, these are people who are straining muscles, dislocating joints and breaking bones,” says Deborah Hersman, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board and current CEO of the nonprofit National Safety Council.
The Chewbacca Experiment
Mobile phones make us think we can multitask, but there’s now proof that they impair us, even when we’re not behind the wheel. Using a phone changes the way we walk—either by slowing us down, or veering us way off course.
The city of Hayward, Calif., installed tongue-in-cheek traffic signs in early 2015, including this “Heads up!” admonition to distracted pedestrians.PHOTO:ROBERT GALBRAITH/REUTERS
I asked a colleague to dress up like Chewbacca from Star Wars and hang out on a San Francisco street during the morning commute this week. Then I interrupted pedestrians staring down at their phones, and asked whether they’d noticed a legendary Wookiee lurking about. Many hadn’t.
Ira Hyman Jr., a psychology professor at Western Washington University, tells me this is called “inattentional blindness.” In 2008, he conducted one of the first versions of my cellphone-distraction test, asking passersby if they’d noticed a clown on a unicycle. Half of the non-cellphone-using pedestrians saw the clown, but only a quarter of people talking on a phone did.
“People have this impression that they were aware. But they have no idea how much they’re missing,” says Prof. Hyman.
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.”
Can Technology Solve This?
Though personal willpower plays the biggest role, I’m not holding my breath that many people will keep their cellphones stashed when they hit the sidewalk. However, we need to teach children that putting down their phones when crossing the street belongs right up there with looking both ways.
A stretch of sidewalk at a popular tourist destination in Chongqing, China, was designated for cellphone users in September 2014.PHOTO:REUTERS
Better urban planning could help. Some towns and college campuses have put “look up” signs in dangerous stairwells and intersections. Announcements in Hong Kong’s subwaysadvise passengers, “Don’t keep your eyes only on your mobile phone.” New York City reduced speeds for cars, and San Francisco has been making more busy corridors pedestrian-only, partly in response to walkers looking at their phones.
Last fall, road signs appeared in Stockholm, warning cars about texting pedestrians. It turns out they were made by two artists, Jacob Sempler and Emil Tiismann . It was a social-media sensation. “Which is pretty ironic,” says Mr. Sempler. “Most people probably just passed the actual signs, glued to their phones.”
How much of an obligation do the phone makers themselves have to address this growing danger? The auto industry is a useful comparison: Many lives were saved when people chose to wear seat belts, but still more were saved when air bags became a regulatory requirement. Today, most top auto makers are also integrating automatic-braking systems, which work even if the driver isn’t acting responsibly.
Smartwatches like the Apple Watch and Samsung’s Galaxy Gear keep data addicts from having to look down at their phone all the time—replacing it with a smaller screen that’s faster to check.
The Ditto, a tiny $40 wireless device I’ve been trying, attempts to alleviate fear of missing out by vibrating when your phone has a notification you actually care about. Another startup company, Ringly, makes jewelry that subtly changes color to notify you of important updates.
The core problem is the phone itself. Rutgers University engineer Shubham Jain has been working with colleagues on an app that determines when someone using a phone is walking into an intersection. When you do, it momentarily locks the phone screen—and flashes a warning to look up.
Researchers at Rutgers University made an Android app that senses when a texting pedestrian steps into a street, warning the person to look up.PHOTO:GEOFFREY A. FOWLER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
I tried one version, which taps the phone’s GPSto determine what’s an intersection. Another version uses inexpensive sensors in shoes to determine, within two steps, when the user has stepped into the street.
“There is no cure for stupidity,” says Ms. Jain. But the same technology that created the problem could also play a role in its solution, she says, by suppressing distractions and alerting us to dangers. Nobody wants a digital nag, but maybe if this were a slick Apple Watch feature, some of us might turn it on.
Victims of the Attention Economy
A more fundamental step would be helping us cut through the cacophony of notifications from apps that want—but don’t really need—our attention.
“I think it is a problem of ethics,” says Prof. Atchley. “If you’re selling the ability to grab somebody’s attention, you’re probably going to do that despite what might be best for that person.”
Back at the San Francisco garage, Mr. Fiori says these days he knows many regular passersby not by their name or occupation, but by the flickering images on their screens.
“Cellphones have made our lives that much easier and that much faster,” he says. “But they’ve taken away something from us, too.”
