According to NYC DOT, it's safe to cross a street while texting

[fiamme red]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/n...ng-report.html

...Worried about the danger that addictive smartphones might pose on car-clogged streets, New York State lawmakers in 2017 ordered New York City to study “the dangers of being a distracted pedestrian.”

Now the results are in: Texting while walking in the five boroughs will most likely not get you killed, according to a report released by the city’s Transportation Department last week.

The study found “little concrete evidence that device-induced distracted walking contributes significantly to pedestrian fatalities and injuries.” In a review of national data, local reports and public health studies, the Transportation Department confirmed what safe-streets advocates nationwide have long held: cars pose more of a fatal threat to pedestrians than chatty group texts...

I was commuting by bike a few days ago and almost hit a woman who stepped off the curb into the segregated bike lane while texting. I don't think the NYC DOT should encourage this practice with a study based on scanty data.

[Ozz]

you need to look and see if the person is wearing little white earbuds.....

that is the signal that responsibility for their personal safety has been transferred to those around them....

as they are too busy to be bothered with the risk of death.

[zmalwo]

If everyone biked to where ever they go we would have universal healthcare by now.

[nooneline]

Originally Posted by fiamme red

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/n...ng-report.html

I was commuting by bike a few days ago and almost hit a woman who stepped off the curb into the segregated bike lane while texting. I don't think the NYC DOT should encourage this practice with a study based on scanty data.

No, the DOT does not say "it's safe to cross a street while texting." They say that "device-induced distracted walking [does not] contribute significantly to pedestrian fatalities." Those are two different things.

six years of data on pedestrian fatalities across the country summing nearly 30,000 cases, and having those data align with 4 years of NYC data showing 2 phone-related incidents out of nearly 900 fatalities, both saying about 0.2% of incidents are related to ped phone use - seems to me that that's a lot of data, and that the conclusion that ped phone use doesn't contribute to a meaningful number of ped fatalities is completely supported.

the DOT isn't encouraging any practice - just being clear about what's actually dangerous.

perceived danger and actual danger are two very different things, which is why a lot more people get prescriptions of anti-anxiety medications to travel by plan than they do to travel by car.

[nooneline]

So here's why the DOT does a study on something like this.

They want to reduce traffic fatalities. Good!

To do that, they have to understand what behaviors drive the most fatalities. Some city councilperson starts getting loud at a meeting about distracted pedestrians, the newspapers cover it, and the DOT has to review the data to see if phone-distracted peds are the reason that people are dying.

And they find that surprise, it's not the reason that people are dying. Which is to say that if you magically wave a wand and nobody ever looks at a phone while on the sidewalk or street again, guess what? It wouldn't dent fatality numbers.

This allows the DOT to focus on the real behavior that is a) obviously dangerous and b) contributes to the most pedestrian fatalities: speeding, failure to yield, and driver inattention.

Here's the report, with their copious amounts of data and their very clear and sensible conclusions: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downlo...-be-deadly.pdf

[benb]

Yah the full report says of course it's better to not be distracted with your phone while crossing the street.

But it also says concentrating on getting drivers to be more safe is more important for reducing injuries.

[fiamme red]

Pedestrian distraction is usually not reported in crash data. When pedestrians are killed while holding a cell phone, investigators don't go through their records to see if they were texting at the moment of the crash.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...15000689#bib11

"Though newspapers have reported vehicles hitting and killing pedestrians who were talking or manipulating mobile devices (Sridharan and Parrino, 2005, Zeller, 2007), this information was not shown on crash reports (Hedlund, 2010)."

[nooneline]

yeah but the DOT study complimented national crash reports with city crash reports, and also factored in observational studies on pedestrian phone use and emergency room data with pedestrian self-reports.

the latter category is interesting, a study of a few hundred injured pedestrians found that 14% WERE distracted, but the extreme minority of those distracted, injured pedestrians were distracted by looking down at a phone screen.

"It is of note that while observations reflect that 9-13% of pedestrians are distracted by a phone while crossing the street, only 0.2% of New York City pedestrian fatality reports reflect electronic distraction at the time of the crash. Cell phone use by pedestrians does not appear to be disproportionately contributing to fatal pedestrian crashes."

i mean, believe what you want, but personally in a world of finite resources i'd rather see the focus placed on the actually dangerous driver behavior than occasionally irritating pedestrian behavior. after all, speeding, driver inattention, and failure to yield are factors in over half of fatal crashes.

[cash05458]

How about this?...pay attention while driving and walking as well...they really needed to do a study on this? We can make anything complicated I suppose...

[XXtwindad]

https://forums.thepaceline.net/showt...ight=wandering

[jtbadge]

Great, another victim blaming thread.

[FlashUNC]

Originally Posted by cash05458

How about this?...pay attention while driving and walking as well...they really needed to do a study on this? We can make anything complicated I suppose...

It's almost like science requires collection and evaluation of evidence to confirm a hypothesis.

Weird.

[Blue Jays]

Originally Posted by cash05458

"...How about this?...pay attention while driving and walking as well..."

Agreed. There is no upside to being distracted 24 x 7 x 365 with a smartphone.

[fiamme red]

Originally Posted by FlashUNC

It's almost like science requires collection and evaluation of evidence to confirm a hypothesis.

Weird.

Except that the "study" by NYC DOT is a manipulation of statistics, not science.

[cash05458]

Originally Posted by FlashUNC

It's almost like science requires collection and evaluation of evidence to confirm a hypothesis.

Weird.

you call that science? Yep...Mendel stuff for sure...