An interesting view point of Texting Pedestrians.
Motor Mouth: “Petextrians” proving Darwin rightFord has a system to detect distracted, texting pedestrians, but why do we need it in the first place?
This week, Lorraine Sommerfeld and David Booth found themselves at odds concerning the announcement about a new system by Ford, which can detect and warn a driver of pedestrians distracted by their phones – or, “petextrians.” David gives his viewpoint against the concept here, and you can follow the link at the end for Lorraine’s argument.
I wonder what Charles Darwin might have made of Ford’s recent boast that its latest Pre-Collision Assist technology “can predict human movement, helping reduce the severity of, or eliminate, frontal collisions” between cars and pedestrians.
Darwin, of course, was the famed English naturalist who quantified the theory of evolution, more commonly known — in often derogatory tones these days, as the concept of personal responsibility falls out of vogue — as “survival of the fittest.” Darwin’s theory says those members of a species who survive long enough to reproduce are the ones that will pass their traits along to subsequent generations. Essentially, in a process Darwin called natural selection, those gifted with functional advantages survived longer than their less fortunate species-mates, and eventually changed the genetics — and, thus, the behaviours — of said species.
And what exactly does Darwinism have to do with pedestrian protection, you ask?
Just this: The pedestrians that so desperately need saving are actually, says Ford, “petextrians.”
No, aliens from a distant planet have not landed and are somehow getting mowed down in our crosswalks. Petextrians — I didn’t know there was such a word, either, though the Urban Dictionary tells me they’ve been in existence since 2009 — it turns out, are “people who text while walking.”
Despite my — and, most probably, your — obliviousness to this scourge of distracted walking, it seems this is actually a problem. Teens (who, reportedly, text 100 times a day on average), millennials and even the occasional adult seem to be getting run over because they’re neck deep in Facebook, Twitter or whatever other stupid social media they’re interacting with, when they should be — like every other sentient being in the animal kingdom — looking out for large, predatory beasts that might be looking to do them harm.
How big a problem is petextrianing? Well, statistics from the United States show pedestrian deaths are on the rise. That’s doubly troubling since motorist fatalities have dropped dramatically in recent years, meaning that pedestrian deaths now account for 15 per cent of all automotive-related fatalities, compared with just 11 per cent in 2004.
And it seems that distracted walking is to blame for at least part of the increase in pedestrian mortality. One study found that three and a half times as many pedestrians killed between 2004 and 2010 were using a cellphone. And, for those of you who don’t remember six short years ago — as numerous studies show, all this connectivity is shortening our attention spans — the number of cellphones in use has increased by almost 40 per cent since then. Even those numbers seemingly don’t do the problem justice; subsequent research from the Universities of Washington and Georgia estimates that anywhere between a third and one-half of all pedestrians crossing intersections were distracted. Indeed, people are so desperate to remain constantly connected, says one researcher from William Paterson University, that the highest incidences of distracted cross-walking are observed in pedestrians emerging from underground subway stops, which, of course, don’t offer cellular service.
Nor will it come as much of a surprise that said distractions cause all manner of problems for safe human interaction with cars. The same researchers in Georgia and Washington found that those who were distracted took one to two seconds longer to cross the street, were more likely to ignore the light and were less likely to look both ways, forgetting that most basic lesson their parents surely tried to pass on. Meanwhile, researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia noted that pedestrians can’t even walk in a straight line when they’re texting.
More alarming — and this is where that whole Darwinian theory of natural selection rears its ugly head — is that a research paper on Understanding & Addressing Pedestrian Safety by the U.S. Governors Highway Safety Association says that up to 40 per cent of 13- to 18-year-olds who have been hit — or nearly hit — by an automobile, bicycle or motorcycle, also believe it is okay to cross the street while texting or talking on the phone. Scarier is that they also believe most people agree with that assertion.
Let’s just review this for a moment, shall we? It can take as little as 25 pounds of pressure to break a bone in the human body. The typical automobile — thanks to cheap gas and the renewed popularity of trucks and SUVs — weighs in the neighbourhood of 4,000 pounds. Making the hazard just that much more dangerous, these vehicles are, even in residential areas, travelling at speeds as high as 80 km/h. As predators go, they are bigger and faster than anything our forebearers might have faced in the wild.
Yet 40 per cent of our kids believe it’s perfectly acceptable to cross the street oblivious to the dangers these two-ton beasts might wreak on their skeletal superstructure (not to mention internal organs). Surely walking unknowingly into a stream of speeding cars is the automotive equivalent of jumping into a lion cage wearing nothing but Lady Gaga’s meat dress.
Indeed, if we need to protect our youth from the stupidity of texting while crossing our streets, what other iPhone-related activities might we have to kid-proof? Will we have to — as the Chinese city of Chongqing recently did — create special “non-smartphone lanes” on sidewalks? Will we have to rubberize our shower stalls when cellphones finally become waterproof? And what safety nanny, pray tell, will we conjure up to protect millennial parachutists too distracted to pull the ripcord because, you guessed it, they were busy taking a selfie against the pretty blue sky?
It is not within the purview of a mere automotive column to question current societal concepts of rights versus responsibilities, or, indeed, try to posit exactly where the line between corporate liability and personal responsibility breaks. Even if it were, I’m not smart enough to know the solution; it is simply beyond my ken.
But I do know this: When we have to develop technology to protect people too stupid to walk safely, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. And it has little to do with iPhones. Or automobiles.
See the opposing view below:
Saving lives is more important than blaming “petextrians”http://driving.ca/auto-news/news/nobody-wins-the-war-between-cars-and-pedestriansInstead of buying into the blame game, we all need to take responsibility for each other's safety – and, of course, our own
This week, Lorraine Sommerfeld and David Booth found themselves at odds concerning the announcement about a new system by Ford, which can detect and warn a driver of pedestrians distracted by their phones – or, “petextrians.” Lorraine gives her argument “for” here, and you can follow the link at the end for David’s alternate viewpoint.
“I believe he was actually on that damn phone, because that’s all he had in his face was that damn phone,” he said. “I believe he was looking at it and tragically walked in front of a vehicle.”
This sentence is breaking my heart. Not because I knew the family of a young man killed as he crossed a busy undivided highway near my city, but because his father painfully, but immediately, sought to lay blame not on a motorist, but on his own obviously beloved son. Sometimes people we love do dumb things. And sometimes it ends tragically.
Many collisions between cars and pedestrians or cyclists go unreported, including those that happen on private property, such as parking lots; that skews statistics. Most of us see dozens of people texting and walking every day, which makes our anecdotal knowledge feel stronger than the fact that the majority of pedestrians in Toronto (Pedestrian and Cycle Safety Report) – in fact, 67 per cent – had the right of way at the time they were hit; the vehicle had the right of way only 19 per cent of the time.
When cars meet pedestrians, regardless of who is at fault, it is the pedestrian who pays the biggest price. Always. Same with cyclists. Yet it remains a loaded conversation to have, as if ascertaining blame could somehow change physics. With drivers being increasingly distracted, pedestrians have to remain more vigilant; instead, campaigns to increase pedestrian and cyclist safety end up with one side blaming the other, and injury and fatality rates that remain stubbornly unacceptable.
Available statistics about car/pedestrian collisions can be twisted and folded a thousand ways, but most fail to recognize the fact that we do not have roadways, nor a car culture: We have a transportation system, and that transportation system encompasses those who walk, cycle, use mobility devices, drive, ride motorcycles or jog. That’s a lot of demands to place on a system, but no one life in that system is worth more nor less than another.
Inattentive pedestrians are a problem; jaywalking pedestrians are also a problem. But if 67 per cent had the right of way when hit, it’s wrong to keep solely blaming pedestrians. The weather is a huge factor, too, as witnessed by a recent dark, rainy October day when 18 pedestrians were hit on Toronto streets – one fatally. I shudder when I realize someone completely shrouded in black is crossing a street in front of me at night, and I have no indication they are even there. Sure, reflective vests look dorky, but looking dead isn’t a good look for many, either.
We know the slower cars are going, the far greater the safety of pedestrians. Last year a Toronto Board of Health study announced a person hit by a car going 50 km/h has an 85 per cent chance of dying; a car going 30 km/h cuts the risk to five per cent – so many jurisdictions are dropping speed limits to 30 km/h. That Toronto report also shows that the majority of collisions (54 per cent) take place on major arterial roads, those with 60 km/h posted limits. The next largest group is the minor arterials, at 34 per cent, with posted limits of 50 km/h. I am not a fan of artificially slow speed limits, including the recent rush to drop most inner speed limits to 30 km/h. Pedestrians are at their highest risk (69 per cent) in an intersection; we need to address crossing behaviour on both sides of the equation. And while the highest incident of collision occurs in intersections, the highest rate of fatality occurs mid-artery: jaywalking. Cars have gathered some speed, and these are not the streets that are already at 40 km/h (now 30 km/h).
It’s easy to blame young people for texting and walking, though studies now show that drivers who text and drive cut across many age groups. And pedestrians over 65 are over-represented in fatality rates, comprising just 14 per cent of the population yet showing up as half the deaths. Seniors are more likely to have cognitive issues, to move more slowly and to have a harder time recovering from injuries. Our population is aging, and pedestrian injury and death has to focus not just on school zones, but all our residents.
Toronto Police Traffic Services recently did an education blitz warning pedestrians that they aren’t to enter a crosswalk when the countdown indicator has begun. I read a lot of yipping about that, but I’ve been totally unable to turn at a light countless times because the crosswalk is always full of pedestrians regardless of the light cycle. Some cities are removing turns – both right and left – from their major downtown arteries to prevent the constipated results of cars unable to make safe turns.
Ford recently announced its newest people saving technology, Pre-Collision Assist with Pedestrian Detection, which will no doubt bring the Darwinists in swinging. It will detect people walking with their nose in a phone and warn the drivers with literal bells and whistles, and if that driver doesn’t respond, the car will brake itself to avoid the collision. Frankly, after Ford announced its intent to move to fully automated vehicles by 2021, announcements like these will be coming forward faster and faster; they’re simply part of the mechanisms that will be in place when there is no driver at all, not necessarily as a must-have feature to help you kill fewer people. This kind of tech is about not needing a driver rather than needing to warn one.
People on foot and on bicycles or any other device are part of our transportation system, as surely as any motorist. We have to do a better job at preventing metal from meeting flesh, but it’s going to take solutions and respect from all players. Drivers can’t rely on their car to warn them, people on foot need to be visible and aware and everyone has to know the rules aren’t just for everyone else.
Personally, I'm not so sure inventing the cell phone was all that good of an idea. Way too many stupid users out there. At times, I include myself in that group. I suppose we all are to some extent. I'll take Darwin's side on this one. I do think use of a cell phone should be illegal in a moving vehicle. Or, maybe within a certain distance of the operator's controls should be a dead zone, I don't pretend to have the answer but, if a pedestrian is stupid or distracted enough to walk out in front of traffic, shame on them.
