Texting can be Hazardous but will Texting Lanes catch on?

Texting while driving is banned because its dangerous, not only to yourself but to those around you, But texting and walking isn’t dangerous, is it? Well unsurprisingly it’s also fairly hazardous in its own right and its not just annoying for those people you may happen to bump into as pleny of people have been hurt and had near misses by not paying attention to where they are walking.

Over the past few years there has been a spate of incidents involving texting pedestrians like the women who fell into a lake when texting, then there is the women who walked in front of a freight train and who can forget the woman who fell 60-foot off a cliff because she was texting.

Well in the latest texting incident involves a Chinese girl getting stuck in a storm drain because she was so busy texting she didn’t look where she was walking.

It appears that as the teenager was walking down a street in Mianyan City, in China’s Sichuan Province, she was preoccupied with texting friends and inadvertently stepped between the metal bars covering a drain.

Source www.express.co.uk

Being of slim build her foot and leg went through the grill leaving her painfully wedged and unable to free herself. Fortunately passersby alerted the authorities and the fire brigade was able to remove her leg from the drain and along with some online ridicule and a little humiliation she only suffered minor cuts and bruises, which required no hospital treatment.

With so many accidents due to texting Belgium has jumped into the news this week by announcing “texting pedestrian lanes”. While it could just be a marketing ploy by one ingenious Smartphone store the new initiative could also make an interesting social experiment and may help prevent a few embarrassing accidents.

Source BBC News

The narrow “text walking lane” should let users continue their texting antics without bothering other pedestrians or coming to any real harm. It’s aimed at reducing the number of phone breakages due to collisions between texters and other pedestrians but should also prevent people from inadvertently walking out in front of traffic, taking an unexpected dip in a lake or becoming stuck in a storm drain.

The easier option of course is for people to look where they are going but until that happens Belgium may be an ideal place for serial texters.

Whether these lanes become a permanent feature and are adopted elsewhere will remain to be seen, but for now at least there are some safe texting places that are free from hazards.