City Installs Traffic Lights In Sidewalks For Smartphone Users (washingtonpost.com)

tlhIngan writes: It's finally happened -- the smartphone zombies are here. The German city of Augsburg installed traffic lights in the sidewalks so smartphone users don't have to look up. Apparently people are so addicted to their smartphones they can't be bothered to look up at traffic signals, so embedding them in the ground they don't have to. According to the Washington Post report, the city spokeswoman Stephanie Lermen thinks the money used to install the lights is well spent. A recent survey conducted in several European cities including Berlin, found that almost 20 percent of pedestrians were distracted by their smartphones. Of course, younger people are at higher risk as they're willing to risk their safety to look at their Facebook profiles or WhatsApp messages, the survey found. The problem may be even worse in the U.S: A survey by the University of Washington found that 1 in 3 Americans is busy texting or working on a smartphone at dangerous road crossings. City officials say installing the traffic lights is justified: The idea is to install such traffic lights came after a 15-year-old girl was killed by a tram. According to police reports, she was distracted by her smartphone as she crossed the tracks.

Comments

Isn't this a self-correcting problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't this problem fix itself after a while?

Re:Isn't this a self-correcting problem?

[cayenne8]

Won't this problem fix itself after a while?

I was thinking the same thing....what a wonderful opportunity to see natural selection at work, in real time.

I think one of the reasons we're seeing so many inept and stupid people out there (and c'mon, you gotta admit you see them every day)...is that we've been protecting people from themselves WAAAAY too much, and have prevented nature from adding chlorine to the gene pool at appropriate times.

As the previous post alluded to...let nature take care of this situation itself.

Re:Isn't this a self-correcting problem?

[cayenne8]

You'd rather have the financial impact of swathes of the population being killed in easily-preventable ways, just so you can feel superior to them?

No, I'd just rather the hoards of idiots that can't even bear to stare way from "their precious" long enough to miss oncoming traffic, get thinned out a bit, so as to allow those of us trying to get somewhere and do something to get on with it, and not have to dodge these mindless zombies.

Re:Isn't this a self-correcting problem?

[epyT-R]

A few changes in the law to minimize driver culpability towards jaywalkers and other pedestrians who don't follow the rules (such as look both ways before they leap) might result in a spike of deaths by inattention, but afterwards, the rest should mend their ways. If not, I won't lose much sleep over these morons being killed off by their busyboxes. Thinning the herd keeps broken adaptation to a minimum. I'd also minimize the impact of broken financial systems that assign an individual's responsibility for stupidity to others.

The Downward Spiral:

[Hartree]

Isn't this subverting the natural course of evolution?

Re:The Downward Spiral:

[AmiMoJo]

Isn't pretty much all medicine and human progress in general subverting the course of evolution?

Re:The Downward Spiral:

[Dog-Cow]

If you protect stupid people from themselves, you hurt everyone else.

Stupid idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Let Darwinism take its course.

Good for them

[Kohath]

Nice to see a government that cares about keeping people safe rather than just taking their money and scolding them.

Re:Good for them

[smooth wombat]

Because it's the government job to protect every person from every single possible calamity which may befall that person rather than encouraging people to take responsibility for themselves.

Essentially, you're admitting people are too stupid to take care of themselves so Big Brother has to do so.

Are these the kind of people we want to perpetuate our species? Ones who can't think or act for themselves?

Re:Use an app instead

[rmdingler]

The problem with this sort of conditioning is that it desensitizes the user even further to the world around him.

When exceptions are made that do not penalize risky behavior, it encourages more risky behavior, perhaps in an environment without any protection.

Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

If a girl can't notice a train, they are not going to notice lights on the ground. If they can't even notice they are walking into a street... I bet they think all drivers will stop to let them pass.

Ok, lets forget highway improvements, lets put all that money into putting lights into the sidewalks!

Situational Awareness

[Required Snark]

This is just the latest example of the erosion of situational awareness: the ability to monitor what is happening in the immediate environment. Smartphones, earbuds, and texting all displace attention from the "here and now" by redirecting mental focus to a non-local environment. Note that this is beyond what happens with reading a book or listening to music without headphones because of the immersive/interactive nature of the experience.

The loss of situational awareness makes people more susceptible to bad outcomes because the warning cues don't get through. Hence walking into traffic while looking at a screen. Obviously reading and walking can have the same result, but before the advent of current smartphones there were far fewer people who acted that irresponsibly. Also it was not social acceptable because most people realized the potential hazard. Now that smartphones are ubiquitous social norms have changed and people just don't care about what's going on around them.

A more direct way to say it is that people now act very stupidly in public. They inhabit a personal bubble and blindly assume that reality will never intrude. There will never be enough padding in the world to protect them from a lack of attention. To quote Forrest Gump, "Stupid is as stupid does".