We need to follow Honolulu’s lead
The thing I fear most when I am looking at my phone while walking down the street isn’t the possibility that I will get hit by a car or fall into a ditch. It’s that an elderly person will make eye contact with me.
I fear this more than death or sudden descent into a hole because the look that elderly people give me when I text and walk at the same time — an activity that usually leads me to lose my footing in a divot or stumble over a buried tree root — is one of profound judgment and pity.
It’s a look that says, “You don’t need to use a cane or a walker to get around. All your faculties appear to be in order, and yet you still can’t manage to make it down the street in one piece because of that device in your hand. You’re a bit of a loser.” If looks could kill, in other words, this would be one of the lethal ones.
This is why I wholeheartedly support the belief that governments should issue fines to people crossing the road who have their eyes glued to the screens of their smartphones. Not only is the practice exceedingly dangerous, it also provokes soulcrushing looks of disapproval from old people that no one should ever have to bear.
The first city government to take this problem seriously did so this week. According to a new law in Honolulu, Hawaii, anyone crossing the road with their head in their phone can be fined up to $35 (U.S.) by police. Some have dubbed this the “Zombie Law,” an allusion to the supposedly zombie-like nature of people like me who walk around with their eyes fixed on their screens.
But the zombie comparison is inaccurate because a zombie is on a mission and he can’t be deterred. He must eat brains, but in order to eat brains he has to follow a human who has some. This usually involves walking in a straight line, uninterrupted.
But those of us who walk around with our heads in our screens lack the focused determination of the average undead stalker. The moment our phones buzz in our pockets we are prone to forget where we are going and what our purpose is. Worse, we stop in our tracks quite suddenly in order to check our messages, sometimes causing a pedestrian pileup behind us. We are in a sense, less predictable and harder to evade than zombies.
Worse still, if the source of our phone’s buzzing is an email from a colleague whose tone is difficult to read, we stand there hunched in the middle of the sidewalk for several minutes analyzing the office memo like an ancient scroll: “Is Susan annoyed? She usually signs ‘Thanks!’ But this time she just signed ‘Thanks.’ Something must be wrong.”
No wonder old, phoneless people pity us. We are a sad bunch. And I think we know it. According to a poll from last year by the market research company Insights West, the majority of Canadians surveyed support regulations to ban “distracted walking.” Though this idea was unsurprisingly more popular with older Canadians in the baby boomer demographic, a little more than half of respondents 18 to 34 reported that they’d support such a ban.
The takeaway from this, in my mind, is that most people don’t enjoy distracted walking. It isn’t fun to multi-task strolling and scrolling. It’s anxiety-inducing and often nauseating. But an addiction is an addiction. Nobody realistically thinks it’s a good idea to cross a busy intersection totally immersed in a screen, but people do it everyday. And they do it everyday, presumably, because our hyper-connected culture is an excellent enabler of smartphone addiction.
Therefore, the threat of a steep fine might make texting while walking a compulsion that is easier to curb. But 35 bucks isn’t nearly steep enough. Toronto, always looking for a way to be “world class,” has an opportunity here. We should one up Honolulu. We should adopt a similar distracted-walking fine, but double it to $70.
Of course, not everyone is convinced fines are a good solution to this problem, least of all our pro- vincial government, which last year denied Toronto city council’s request to prohibit distracted walking.
This week, reporters at the CBC revisited the issue with Const. Clint Stibbe, a Toronto Police spokesperson, who said “we shouldn’t need a law for common sense.” But unfortunately, we do. And we have plenty of them on the books already. In Ontario, we have Ryan’s Law, which makes it mandatory for schools to allow kids with asthma to carry their inhalers on their persons (as opposed to storing them in their lockers). In Alberta, it is illegal to shave your beard while driving. Nationwide, it is illegal to take somebody water-skiing one hour after sunset.
These are all common-sense laws I’m certain that many Canadians are quite grateful for. So why not add another? In the name of our streets and our scrambled brains — and in the hope that the two don’t meet — we should follow Honolulu and write a distracted-walking law into our city’s books. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.