How the Streets of New York Got More Dangerous
Damon Winter/The New York Times
A new iPhone application, Type n Walk, provides the texting pedestrian a view of the street ahead.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
A woman navigating Times Square as she types a message into her cell phone.
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I can barely text and chew gum at the same time, much less text, walk, think and watch the street in front of me, even if that street is visible on the same small screen as my text. To Type n Walk west on 43rd Street felt not so much efficient as wildly incompetent, which is also how I feel typing and texting without the application. I feel fairly confident it would take less training to make me proficient in laparoscopic surgery than it would to make me feel safe walking and texting on the streets of New York.
Instead of yapping into the air about whatever medical form didn’t get filed or short sale didn’t happen, now people are tapping those same thoughts furiously into their phones, like mass Morse coders, all while moving at speed down the street. The new model of communication may be more private, but it’s certainly just as irritating, and surely not as safe (so far, unlike texting and driving, it remains legal). Mid-text, I looked up to see a businessman crossing 43rd Street on Madison Avenue nearly bump into a taxi that was farther west of the stoplight than it should have been. Naturally, the pedestrian’s thumbs were busy on his BlackBerry at the moment.
I stopped him to ask whether he thought walking and texting was safe. “It’s no big deal,” he told me. He looked up at the light to make sure it was safe before he crossed, he said.
Just as The New York Times recently reported that cellphone manufacturers pushed the convenience of driving while dialing even as they knew of its dangers, surely someday history will laugh a bitter little laugh at the thought that anyone would manufacture an application to improve the safety of walking while texting, or Texthook, a new device that makes it easier to text while pushing a stroller.
This summer, the American College of Emergency Room Physicians released a statement expressing concern about the issue, citing a Chicago doctor who was seeing a lot of face, chin, eye and mouth injuries among young people who reported texting and tumbling.
At Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, Marc Felberbaum, an emergency room doctor, said he had been seeing more of this over the past year. He recalled in particular one patient who had tripped on a curb while texting, not only breaking his wrist but losing grasp of his cellphone, whereupon it was crushed by an oncoming car. (And yes, it was with some satisfaction that the doctor recounted the last part of this cautionary tale.)
The city’s Department of Transportation does not keep statistics on such accidents, and Dr. Felberbaum pointed out it might be tough to compile accurate numbers. “It’s not the kind of thing people want to admit,” he said.
In Finland, home to Nokia, instead of hoping to persuade people to stop typing while walking, officials decided to act more aggressively at particular crosswalks where numerous texting pedestrians had been killed or seriously injured by trams. They installed crossing signals in the street itself, using embedded red and green lights that are visible to people looking down, instead of ahead. “People were paying attention to whether the light was red or green before they started to cross,” said Richard Eggleton, president of Marimils, a lighting systems company, “but they’d get distracted in the middle and not notice if the light had changed.”
The issue became pressing to me personally when I nearly mowed down, in my car, a teenage boy crossing West End Avenue. Oblivious to the green light, he was texting furiously as he approached a pretty young woman just a few feet away — and I would bet my car that his urgent text was being sent to the same girl he’d be talking to, in person, within instants.
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