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Smartphones May Be To Blame For Unprecedented Spike In Pedestrian Deaths, Says Report (cnn.com)
According to a report from the Governors Highway Safety Association, the United States saw its largest annual increase in pedestrian fatalities since such record keeping began 40 years ago. "The [association] estimated there were 6,000 pedestrian deaths in 2016, the highest number in more than 20 years," reports CNN. "Since 2010, pedestrian fatalities have grown at four times the rate of overall traffic deaths." From the report: The thing that has changed dramatically in recent years is smartphone use. The volume of wireless data used from 2014 to 2015 more than doubled, according to the Wireless Association. Drivers and pedestrians who are distracted by their smartphones are less likely to be aware of their surroundings, creating the potential for danger. The Governors Highway Safety Association looked at data from the first six months of 2016 that came from 50 state highway safety offices and the District of Columbia. The complete data will be available later this year. The findings come as traffic safety experts have called for totally eliminating deaths on roadways. Near-term solutions include designing roads and vehicles to be safer. Cutting down on speeding and drunk driving are obvious targets.
Let Darwin do his work... ;-)
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The biggest problem is the infrastructure, drivers and cars not pedestrians, so I think you are missing the point completly.
I've often wondered why people look away from the act of random terror that cars subject us to in everyday life, instead the victims get blamed. At some point you have to understand that cars are a big health problem.
No one died on their smartphones on my street today. Therefore this trend doesn't exist. It is in fact a conspiracy pushed by the chicken little pedestrian lobby in trying to take away my God given right to have a smartphone and be reckless with it.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
I can see the pedestrian traffic fatalitues in germany only slightly increased http://www.bast.de/EN/Publicat... granted i do not have the 2016 numbers but this is still below the 2005 numbers.
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with headphones, ear buds, air buds and all sorts of other things covering their ears. Not being able to hear what's going on around you is just IMHO silly.
Will listening the latest bang,bang,boom R&B thing save you from a collision? Not it won't and it may make you more liable to be hit by a vehicle.
Just you wait, the insurers will raise rates to cover themselves or eve better in their eyes, exclude anyone using a smartphone while walking or listening to tunes.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Perhaps more worrying is that people are getting distracted by the smartphones whilst voting, with disastrous consequences.
Article cites 6000 pedestrian deaths in 2016, and calls it a spike, but offers no context of how much of an increase that is.
Article cites pedestrian death rate has grown 4 times the overall traffic fatality rate, again without citing the base rate of either.
This could be a huge increase, or hardly any one at all. 100 people per year could have died for first 15 years of the 20 year period, and then spiked up to 6000 in 2016, or, it could have been 5900 per year for first 15 years and slightly increased to 6000 in 2016, both sets probably fit the data, and are enormously different.
Nerd sniping. You don't ever need a smartphone!
My favorite was the texting unicycle that smacked straight into the side of an ambulance.
And don't you wish you had your phone out so you could have filmed that to put on YouTube?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Never happened to me, but then Darth Vader taught me to cross the road https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I second that.
Just yesterday I nearly got run over on my bike by some SUV driver who was texting/dialing while driving.
Smartphones and texting while driving kill people. The problem is so obvious, that carriers had renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog do a freely available documentary on the problem a few years back to keep people from doing this ---> https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Watch it and tell your friends to do that too. It's a must.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I was in Austria - Salzberg (Cool city for history buffs!) and walking and I came to a crosswalk and stopped to let a car go by.
He screeched to a halt and I just looked at him - bewildered since I'm an American.
With an extremely angry expression on his face, he waved frantically for me to cross. He would NOT drive through that crosswalk until I crossed. You bet your ass I did - I ran.
As a driver here in the States., I do that since IT'S THE LAW IN MY STATE OF GA. I get honked at, tailgated and treated like shit by my fellow drivers.
Americans are shitty, aggressive asshole drivers. And they are worse with their phones attached to their ears.
It should be illegal to use a cell phone while driving. Period.
I have an opposing viewpoint... I walk for exercise most days on my lunch hour. I work in an ostensibly "walk friendly" community with a ton of antique shops on main street. I plan my route so I only cross one street that's bigger than a residential side street.
I get nearly killed at least once a month. It's almost always by someone turning left into a parking lot, so they're coming from my rear. The problem here isn't that people are on their phones. The problem is that drivers would mow down pedestrians at an alarming rate if we weren't constantly dodging cars. I once had a lady nearly kill me, then pull into the lot, get out of her car, and berate me for walking on the sidewalk that she needed to drive over.
Another one that bothers me: Car is first at a red light and is turning left. There is no possibility that this car will go anywhere until the light turns green. However, the car slowly creeps forward until they are entirely blocking the crosswalk and ten feet in front of it (on the intersection side). I now have two choices - walk in front of the car, which is nearly in the other road, or walk behind the car. I used to walk behind the car, until one day, a car turned left and almost hit me. I realized that the left turning car couldn't see me because I was completely shielded by the SUV I walked behind. Now I always walk in front of them - or stop and stare at them until they back up.