Daily Dose of Common Sense

Last week, a 15-year old girl fell into a manhole in Staten Island because she wasn’t watching where she was going. Instead of paying attention, she was texting on a cell phone.

Now, the girl wasn’t seriously hurt and just came out scraped, smelly, and minus one shoe. (Since she fell when workers were still putting out orange caution cones, her family plans to sue the city anyway.) But, this brings to light again the danger of texting while doing, well, pretty much anything else.

We’ve all read in the past few years that texting while driving can be a dangerous combination. (In fact, the folks at Car and Driver have just determined that it’s worse than drinking and driving.) But walking and texting, which is clearly a safety issue for pedestrians, doesn’t get quite as much attention.

It should. If you’re texting, you’re looking down at your phone and not watching the roads, sidewalks, or other people around you. You’re not using your peripheral vision to warn against cars, muggers, dog poop, bicycles, or anything else that may be nearby. In London, one street added cushions to its lampposts because texting pedestrians were repeatedly being injured. (We can only hope one of these pre-cushion lamppost crashes is on YouTube.) Can you imagine your tax dollars spent on baby proofing the sidewalks because someone can’t wait to send that extra “LOL”?

Yes, we’re all addicted to our iPhones, BlackBerrys, and cell phones. But, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a pedestrian dies in the U.S. every 110 minutes. Refrain from texting while you’re walking and that will increase your odds of staying safe.

[Thanks Gizmodo!]

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.