No, it’s self defense.
Many accidents are never reported. Most successful evasive actions are never reported.
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Yabba dabba doh!
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Maybe it’s a cultural difference. Where I live destroying someone’s property to “teach them a lesson” will get you into legal trouble. Victim would also probably report it as an attempted theft, because that’s what it’ll look like.
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Writer finds that study says something it doesn’t say. FTFY.
My interpretation is simply that a significant number of people realize that texting while walking is a bad idea so they don’t take the risk.
I would be curious how many pedestrians in the study got injured by cars while punching Nazis.
Nope. I don’t think so. Distracted people will make stupid mistakes and texting or reading is a distraction.
But I assume that a large number of people is doing this only where they think it’s safe, like when staying on the walkway, not expecting such obstacles and expecting that other people make way for them.
The latter is absolutely quite annoying. While I do use my kindle to read when I walk sometimes, I do so only with material I already know (so there’s little chance of becoming totally engrossed) and I regularly check that there are no people around.
When I need do need to do something on my smartphone, I usually stop. Changing the route, starting a new audio play for kiddo? Yeah, that means waiting for a place to safely halt the car without obstructing traffic.
Nope. But I also have better things to do than to look out for them, including stopping to avoid startling them. And if they are on a collision course with my kid, who’s walking right beside me in an orderly fashion, they will get stopped by my arm.
And battery, if the phone has one.
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The apocalypse is now.
Telephone Zombies.
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Your eyes are blinded by your lack of faith; my child.
The essential sin of texting while walking is not its risk; but the fact that you are a filthy pedestrian in open defiance of the manifest destiny of the road in order to be texting while walking.
It is, of course, helpful if there are some lurid stories of death and maiming to illustrate this particular morality play; but the fact of the matter is that ‘pedestrians’ are little more than slow bicyclists in the eyes of the rightful rulers of the road; so anything they do is, and must be, morally suspect.
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Walking with a phone, eh, possibly.
But people stopping in the middle of the pavement to look at their phone? Bring back the death penalty!
Why were you bothering to avoid them before? Personally I sometimes stick an elbow out just to remind them that other people exist.
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I was joking. Apparently the sarcasm tags failed to render.
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Maybe the accident rate is low because the signs are working. https://boingboing.net/2015/02/27/street-sign-heads-up-cross.html
This study brought to you by: Survivorship Bias. Yay!
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Text-walkers are a bit like skateboarders. Both operate out of boredom and desire for escape from the drudgery of walking. They both also rely on an assumption that everyone else will act predictably and stably, so they don’t need to worry about steering or reaction time. Also both occasionally crash into bollards and fall down on curbs.
I joked about this above, but this thread is really making me feel like I’m taking crazy pills. I feel like the responsibility is entirely mine to avoid collisions on the sidewalk because people seem intent to simply walk right into me. Sometimes when I duck out of the way if I’m looking at my phone they give me a dirty look, as if us almost colliding had nothing to do with them. And I see people wander onto the street without giving a crap about traffic plenty - whether you do so when you are on a phone or not it’s more about arrogance/entitlement than distraction. You take someone who apparently doesn’t understand you need to pay any attention to your environment and give them a phone you can blame the phone, I guess. But I’ve been going out of my way to avoid collisions with people who seem to feel that’s entirely my responsibility my whole life, I haven’t noticed a significant difference with phones.
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I agree, I’d say 90% of my near misses with other pedestrians when I’m on my phone are with people who are not on phones but are walking crazy, diagonal right into my path where I’d have to change course, or strollers 2 or 3 abreast that I have to flatten against a fence to let by…they are definitely the only ones who’ve given me dirty looks or said something. With bikes and cars? 100% people illegally cutting me off turning into a crosswalk or running a light.
Some incidents are genuinely my fault ( though mostly the inanimate object ones), but having a phone in your hand definitely makes already rude people vindicated jerks to you.
Also I’m usually commenting on BBS, not texting, so maybe that skews my results…
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No, not calling for the death penalty, just this:
My personal experience is that texting pedestrians are not a problem for car drivers. I barely see them at or on roads, even though I take care to slow down and be prepared to brake whenever an adult human or animal gives the slightest indication that they could veer onto the road. Kids I always slow down for, obviously.
Texting pedestrians are more of an annoyance to other pedestrians and a medium danger (especially to themselves) bicycle users who have to use a shared walkway, which in theory has clearly defined lanes for riders and walkers, but in practice many pedestrians don’t look, especially the texting kind.
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Thanks for including enough about the methodology to make it completely unnecessary to read the study results, Rob! 
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