‘Petextrians’ proving Darwin right
System detects distracted pedestrians, but why do we need it, asks David Booth
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 that 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 that species.
And what exactly does Darwinism have to do with pedestrian protection, you ask?
Just this: The pedestrians who 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 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 are petextrians? Well, statistics from the United States show pedestrian deaths are on the rise.
That’s doubly troubling because 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 (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 don’t do the problem justice; subsequent research from the Universities of Washington and Georgia estimate that anywhere between a third and a half of all pedestrians crossing intersections are 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 these 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 and 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 OK to cross the street while texting or talking on the phone. Even 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 ancestors 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 smartphone-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 rip cord because 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 try to posit exactly where the line between corporate liability and personal responsibility lies. 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 smartphones.
Or automobiles.