Distracted Walking, Cycling, and Driving

[danbrotherston]

Of course, MVC injuries related to distracted pedestrians are easy to study and it's very clear those have not risen as a result of distracted walking.

Do you have some links to those studies? While I haven't seen "moral panic" (or maybe I just don't know what that looks like) it seems to me that distracted walking does increase risk.

Here's a streets blog article citing our own Mike Boos' numbers from our local region. 

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/11/03/d...l-problem/

Here's a curbed article citing a study showing that distracted walking is actually pretty rare.

https://www.curbed.com/platform/amp/2018...-crosswalk

Here's a study showing that distracted and inattentive pedestrians make cross the road at speeds similar to attentive walkers, and that context not distraction is the dominant factor in errors and speed crossing.

https://transfersmagazine.org/walking-on...ic-safety/

Several things are clear to me. 

Let's break it down into two parts:

Walking distracted on a sidewalk or trail, a distracted ped can easily walk on the right side and incur no extra danger.  Of course, a ped, unlike a driver, can know when they are about to enter a conflict zone with cars.

If a ped continues to be distracted during the crossing I'm sure there is some more danger, but no more than a ped who doesn't look when they cross anyway, which we all should in case there is a driver who is not but given the peds hit by drivers in intersections, certainly not everyone does (incidentally, one reason why roundabouts are safer is that they force people to pay more attention than to just a light).

And certainly, no distracted ped is more impaired  than a blind or ped with other impairments who should be able to safely cross the roads .

That's my interpretation.

Given the limit risk and limited scale (again, studies showed very few peds actually crossed distracted) of the risk, and the number of news articles and politicians pushing policies which have basically no basis in real harm observed and often to the exclusion of real safety policies (just see the policies that Yvan Baker pushed to implement in Etobicoke where there are real serious road safety issues) makes me feel this rises to the level of moral panic.