Public safety: Stop texting and walk already

IOWA CITY - You've heard about texting and driving. But public safety and transportation officials say texting and walking can be just as dangerous.

As more people are using smartphones, distracted pedestrians texting or talking are too often stepping into traffic, stumbling off curbs, or walking into signs, officials say. With the University of Iowa back in session, the habit is readily apparent here in this tech-savvy, pedestrian-heavy community.

'This problem of people walking while distracted by devices is on the rise, especially with teens and young adults,” said Jodie Plumert, a UI psychology professor who studies pedestrian behavior. 'They are on their mobile devices a lot and they have to get somewhere. That can be a lethal combination, or at least a dangerous one.”

She cites a 2013 study by Safe Kids Worldwide, a global effort to prevent accidental childhood injury, that found 1-in-5 high school students and 1-in-8 middle school students crossed the street while distracted by mobile devices.

In Iowa City, observe the busy crosswalks between campus and downtown for several minutes, and you'll quickly lose count of pedestrians with heads buried in their smartphones.

'Yeah, I probably could have been hit by a car,” Jenna Monday, a sophomore from Lake Zurich, Ill., admits while she and a friend looked at their phones while crossing Clinton Street to campus.

Students have a tight window to respond to messages or calls between classes, so on the urban campus sending off a text or chatting on the phone while crossing a street is almost second-nature.

'You just kind of do it,” Allison Harmon, a sophomore from Dubuque, said after crossing onto the Pentacrest while reading a group text that had spiraled longer and longer during her last class. 'You get out of class, and you don't really have a lot of time.”

Plumert is studying how mobile devices affect people's attention, decision making and motor skills in UI's Hank Virtual Environment Lab.

Plumert said distracted pedestrians make riskier choices in judging the gaps between cars, and they walk more slowly, increasing the chance of being struck by a vehicle.

'One of the situations I've seen is a group of students will start crossing Clinton Street, and somebody who is distracted on a mobile device may be lagging behind,” Plumert said. 'Those are the situations when I've seen close calls.”

A study beginning this spring will examine whether mobile phone alerts synced to GPS effectively warn distracted walkers when approaching a street, she said.

While researchers say distracted walking is an issue, much of the evidence is anecdotal. Documentation has proved difficult.

Law enforcement in Iowa City and at the UI say their records don't indicate it's been a problem, and UI Hospitals and Clinics emergency room data is dispersed and incomplete.

In Cedar Rapids this past year, police issued more than 25 citations for pedestrians not using the proper crosswalks in the area between Coe College and past 15th Street East along First Avenue. But there was no documentation or reports of cellphone distractions, said Greg Buelow, public safety spokesman. 

One of the few pieces of data available is an analysis by Stateline, a division of the Pew Charitable Trust, which found emergency visits nationwide for injuries related to talking or texting on a cellphone by pedestrians were up 35 percent since 2010.

More typically, officials look at overall pedestrian incidents as an indicator of problems.

The 76,000 pedestrian injuries in 2012 was the most since 2001, and the 4,743 pedestrian fatalities was the most since 2009, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has acknowledged distracted walking is a threat to keeping people safe.

In Iowa, the numbers have been fairly stagnant.

In the past five years, pedestrians have averaged 21 fatalities and 480 injuries a year, according to data from the Iowa Governor's Traffic Safety Bureau and the Iowa Department of Transportation.

Another DOT data set housed at the UI Injury Prevention Research Center shows pedestrian incidents in Johnson County was at a seven-year high in 2013, at 39, and there were 82 pedestrian injuries involving distractions from 2007-13.

Corrine Peek-Asa, a UI professor and director of the injury center, said the numbers are 'widely recognized as being undercounted.”

Patrick Hoye, chief of the Iowa Governor's Traffic Safety Bureau, agreed.

'It is just an issue that is being overlooked in the traffic-safety realm,” Hoye said. 'Law enforcement will tell you the same thing because you are relying on the injured people they are not willing to tell you, ‘I walked off the curb and was hit.'”

Hoye said NHTSA has asked states this year to make pedestrian and bike safety a focus area, in part because of distracted walking. The bureau will be providing cities with grants worth up to $4,200, or possibly more for large cities, to address distracted walking through educational outreach, Hoye said.

The public should be seeing those efforts beginning in April, he said.

'Five to 10 years ago, cellphones weren't as prominent,” Hoye said. 'Now everyone has a cellphone, and they are not just driving, but walking, and more people are involved in texting.”