Chinese city has a "zombie walkway" for slow-walking smartphone users

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/11/hey-im-texting-here.html

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Now sit back and watch them drift out of the zombie lane. :confused:

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It says that cars often come onto the pavement

Well there’s your problem

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I was too busy carefully watching for potholes (and rental bikes, and mopeds…) whilst walking in Xi’an; I’m kind of impressed people can use a phone at the same time.

Interesting to compare this to the approach I encountered in Tokyo a couple of years ago: signs essentially saying ‘walking and texting is dangerous: don’t’.

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My Chinese minder in Hangzhou wouldn’t even look up from her phone when crossing a street - she’d just put her hand out as if to tell the vehicles to stop. I think it works because the drivers there are just more used to close car/scooter/pedestrian interactions, and pay closer attention. Except for the drivers who are also on their phones, of course.
I may have just had my million dollar idea, though - pedestrian horns for honking at cars. AM I A GENIUS?!?!?!?

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As I was glancing across the screen, my brain parsed that as:

Chinese city has a “zombie walkway” for slow-walking saxophone users

That would be an interesting place to visit.

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Cars often come on the pavement? On a road? And this is surprising somehow? I can see how they would need to define things a bit better, but maybe just add a pedestrian walkway before going full zombie?

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The quote is from the BBC. In Britain, “pavement” means what “sidewalk” means in the US.

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Do they have a consistent pattern of stripes demarcating the zombie zone? If not, it may confuse some people. So I hear.

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I passed a zombie youngster on the sidewalk last week. She wasn’t texting, but was reading/watching something. I started to get all judgy, then remembered 10-year-old me reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull on the walk home from school in exactly the same manner (except where I grew up, we didn’t have sidewalks).

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