Pedestrians! Put Down Your Cell Phones!

Using cell phones while driving is a major controversy.  But, what about cell phone or mp3 player use by pedestrians?  There’s a growing body of evidence that walking and talking can be equally hazardous to your health as driving and chatting.

Take the case of  a 17-year-old from Michigan who was wearing ear phones as he walked home along railroad tracks and didn’t hear an approaching Amtrak train.  He was struck and killed.  In another incident, a female jogger was struck and killed in North Carolina while she was listening to her iPod and authorities suspect the mp3 player may have contributed to the accident.

Now doctors and safety experts are talking of their growing concern about pedestrians who use phones, mp3 players and the like.

Statistics Prove Danger

Researchers have focused on the issue and finding some revealing results.  According to their research, in one study of 127 pedestrians, 48 percent of cell phone users stepped into a crosswalk as a car approached.  That was a much higher rate of unsafe behavior than pedestrians who were not listening, texting or otherwise engaged with electronic devices.  The results were published in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention.

The researchers had 60 research participants walk along a designated route.  Fifty percent of them talked on a mobile phone and the other half held onto the phone while waiting for a call (but no call ever came).  The participants were then asked to remember objects along the course they had just walked.  The results showed that the participants who were talking on the phone remembered fewer of the objects than the participants who were not talking on the phone.  In a related study by the same researchers, three observers watched and wrote down the behaviors they saw of the pedestrian who used a cell phone, an Apple iPod, and pedestrians who used neither.  The results showed cell phone users crossed an intersection unsafely more than did the group using the iPod or not using either the iPod or a cell phone.  Just as has been found to be the case with car drivers who use electronic devices in their cars, the pedestrians were significantly distracted, were less aware of their surroundings, practiced unsafe behaviors and put themselves and others at greater risk.

Safety Claim Untrue

The same study also found that cell phone talkers/users felt the devices offered them a means to be safer while walking; a claim the researchers found may be untrue.  The researchers found that pedestrians seem to feel less vulnerable when they carry a cell phone, but in fact they are less safe because they are paying less attention to their surroundings.

The net result of all this may be quite simple:  Whether you are driving or walking, don’t let yourself get distracted to the point where you are not aware of what’s going on around you.

Excuse me, I have a call waiting.

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