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Clown on a unicycle
Walking to
work last Wednesday morning, I was standing at Tremont Street
waiting for the light to change so that I could cross. Tremont
is the busiest street that I pass on the way to work. Not only
does traffic race by at unsafe speeds, but the little
pedestrian-guy pictured on the walk sign is usually praying. In
fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that crossing the street when
the pedestrian signal is on is probably the least safe time to
try to make it to the other side. It all becomes a big joke as
in, “Why did the pedestrian cross the road? To get to the
hospital.”
It would
behoove anyone attempting to make it across in one piece to keep
eyes, ears and every other orifice open and fingers crossed. So
I was completely floored when I saw a young guy yakking on his
cellphone and crossing the street while the light was red, never
bothering to look in either direction. Everyone around me held
their breath as this jerk almost got run over at least twice. It
must be true that God watches over fools and small children.
When he made
it safely to our side we all stared at him, this walking
miracle, but he didn’t even notice. That must have been one
important phone call. It’s funny, I’d almost gotten used to
people talking on their cellphones while driving, but watching
pedestrians nearly kill themselves is a new thing. A recent
article in the Boston Globe (1/17) written by Matt Richtel,
talks about the newest phenomenon of walkers injuring themselves
while talking on their cellphones:
On the day of the
collision last December, visibility was good. The sidewalk was
not under repair. As she walked, Tiffany Briggs, 25, was talking
to her grandmother on her cellphone, lost in conversation. Very
lost.
“I ran into a truck,’’
Briggs said.
It was parked in a
driveway.
Distracted driving has
gained much attention lately because of the inflated crash risk
posed by drivers using cell phones to talk and text.
But there is another
growing problem caused by lower-stakes multitasking — distracted
walking — which combines a pedestrian, an electronic device,
and an unseen crack in the sidewalk, the pole of a stop sign, a
toy left on the living room floor, or a parked, sometimes moving
car.
It must be
embarrassing, to say the least, to get hurt in an altercation
involving an inanimate object. I can just imagine the call to a
parent from the emergency room. “Mom, could you come get me, I’m
at the hospital.”
“Oh my God! My
baby, are you all right? Are you seriously hurt? What happened,
where are you? Don’t worry, darling, Mommy’s coming right over.”
“Well I was
walking in the street and I walked into a telephone pole. It
just came up on me suddenly, Mom, really. I have no idea where
it came from!”
Silence on the
other end of the line. “A telephone pole??? On second thought,
you idiot, you can take the bus home!”
But it’s no
laughing matter. According to Richtel:
Slightly more than 1,000
pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got
distracted and tripped, fell, or ran into something while using
a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from
2007, which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study
conducted by Ohio State University, which says it is the first
to estimate such accidents.
Is it too much
to ask that people actually look where they’re going when they
walk? I’ve given up on drivers who make left turns, back out of
their driveways, change lanes or tail gate me as they blithely
yak away on their phones. But for some reason this
walking-cellphone-talking thing is making me really nuts. Are
people so afraid of being alone with their thoughts that even
walking down the street has to be avoided? And when did
multi-taking become the norm for every waking moment of our
lives?
Cognitive
psychologists and neurologists are studying the impact of
constant multitasking, whether behind a desk or the wheel or on
foot. Researchers are finding that just talking on a phone takes
its own toll on awareness.
Pedestrians
using their phones do not notice objects or people right in
front of them. That was the finding of a recent study at Western
Washington University in Bellingham, Washington by psychology
professor Ira Hyman and his students.
One of the
students dressed as a clown and unicycled around a central
square on campus. About half the people walking in the square by
themselves said they had seen the clown, and the number was
slightly higher for people walking in pairs. But only 25 percent
of people talking on a cellphone said they had, Hyman said.
Up until now I
thought that it was merely annoying to see people with
electronics attached to their heads. But now I’m learning that
it’s dangerous, and not only for them but for everyone around
them. We’re no longer a community sharing our outside space with
others. We no longer notice, let alone appreciate, our
surroundings or the rest of the world. Why should we bother
being civil to a stranger when we always have our friends
umbilically connected to our ears?
And God
forbid if we ever needed someone’s help. We’d have about as much
chance of getting their attention as a clown on a unicycle.
February 4, 2010
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