All around the world, people can’t seem to look away from their cell phones, even when they’re walking down the street. With heads down, watching videos, reading e-mails, or texting friends, life goes on around them, sometimes with dangerous consequences. In China, for example, the World Health Organization estimates that about 68,000 pedestrians are killed each year -- some of them while tragically not watching where they were going. In June 2018, a shopping mall in the city of Xi’an introduced a rather tongue-in-cheek solution by creating pedestrian lanes specifically for the "heads-down tribe" -- a nickname that has emerged in China for cell phone users who don't want to look up from their devices while walking.
Addicted to screens:
- "We are not actually advocating for pedestrians to look at their phones," said a mall spokesperson. "But we can't tell them, ‘You're not allowed to look at your cellphone while walking.’”
- In a similar move in 2014, a street in the city of Chongqing was divided: Phone use was prohibited on one side of the street, and pedestrians using phones -- “at your own risk” -- were relegated to the other side.
- The German city of Augsburg embedded traffic lights into the pavement in 2016 in an attempt to prevent distracted pedestrians from wandering into traffic.