Australia To Fight iPod Use By Pedestrians

Kilrah_il writes "In recent years the number of people killed on roads in New South Wales, Australia has dropped, but strangely enough, the number of pedestrians killed has risen. Some think it's because of the use of iPods and other music players making people not attentive to road dangers (the so-called 'iPod Zombie Trance'). Based on this (unproven) assumption, the Pedestrian Council has started a campaign in an effort to educate the people, but apparently it isn't enough. Now, some are pushing for the government to enact laws to help eradicate the problem. 'The government is quite happy to legislate that people can lose two demerit points for having music up too loud in their cars, but is apparently unconcerned that listening devices now appear to have become lethal pieces of entertainment,' [Harold Scruby of the Pedestrian Council of Australia] said. 'They should legislate appropriate penalties for people acting so carelessly towards their own welfare and that of others. ... Manufacturers should be made to [warn] consumers of the risks they run.'"

Comments

What about cell phones?

[rolfwind]

Just last week, a kid nearly killed himself on my car while texting on the phone and riding a bike going from the parking lot of a strip mall across a main street, with his free hand on the front brake lever.

It was a 45mph zone and most cars zip through at 55mph at that point and it's not a place to expect pedestrians (nor was there a light). Luckily, I saw him and screech to a stop 10 feet in front of him, but he looked up and was so surprised and hit his own brake so hard that he flipped forward and took a total spill.

He was cut up pretty good, could have been much worse, but hopefully his self-inflicted wounds cured him of his dumbassery. He looked 15 too, hope he remembers that lesson when he gets into a car.

Cause of Death: Sony Walkman

[darkonc]

This is not a new problem.

Back in the late 90's it was Sony Walkmans -- Pretty much the same problems, except that the units were much bigger (just the batteries were bigger than an ipod nano), and a casette tape only held about 2 hours of music (non-random access.. although you could fast-forward at much peril to your batteries).

At the time a friend of my roommate volunteered for North Shore Search and Rescue, and a friend of his was a medical examiner who hated Walkman and like devices. He saw all too many fatal accidents, where the cause of the accident was a walkman preventing the victim from hearing the warning noises (horn, grinding machinery, evacuation siren and/or the desperate yells of onlookers, etc), but the official cause of death was always something else (smacked by a car, crushed by machinery, head ripped, suffocated, etc.).

Thus it was that the Sony Walkman was always the bridesmaid of death, but never on the certificate.

Then one day, a girl was hit by a train while walking on the train tracks, listening to a Walkman.

The interesting thing is that she wasn't actually run over by the train. She was bounced off the track by the 'cow catcher' on the front of the train doing it's job. The real problem was that she was wearing the Walkman on her belt around the back .. just over the spleen (a very normal place to wear a walkman, since they were a bit too large to fit in most pockets). As a result, when she was hit by the train, instead of the force of the impact being relatively evenly distributed over her body by the cow-catcher, a good bit of it was concentrated into the Walkman and directed into her internal organs. Much like is claimed to have recently happened to a girl in Crete.

Although she seemed to (more or less) walk away from the accident, she soon collapsed and died from her internal injuries.

Since the Walkman was a major contributing cause of the accident, and effectively delivered the killing blow, the examiner was finally able to put on a death certificate:

Cause of Death: Sony Walkman.