Dumbwalking is the practice of walking slowly and without looking where you are going because you are looking at your mobile phone. Pedestrians using cell phones are impaired and too mentally distracted to fully focus on their surroundings causing them to trip, cross roads unsafely or walk into motionless objects such as street signs, doors, walls or even off cliffs. Given the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, apps, digital video and streaming music, which has infiltrated most aspects of daily life, distracted walking and street crossing will be a road safety issue for the foreseeable future.
Dumbwalking or distracted walking is a phenomenon that has been around since the onset of mobile phones. However with the invention of smart phones, distracted walking has increased sharply causing accidents ranging from mild to fatal worldwide.
With the increase in accidents due to dumbwalking, a lot of cities have created measures to counter this problem. Conversations of smartphone pedestrian lanes are becoming more common in many major cities, with many initiating campaigns and implementing actual texting lanes. The National Geographic TV channel launched an initiative in Washington DC in July 2014, where they created no cellphone walking lanes, and in 2015 Antwerp introduced Europe's first official "text lane". Also in 2015, the Chinese city of Chongqing, home to more than 9 million people, put up satirical “no cellphone” lanes on the sidewalk to remind people their distraction can be dangerous and annoying.
Mobile phone apps like "Walk and Text" (Type n Walk), have been created to help people see what is going on in front of them with the help of a back camera.
According to a Pew Research survey in mid-2012, 53% of all adult cell owners have been on either the giving or receiving end of a “distracted walking” encounter.
The survey found that 23% of cell owners have physically bumped into another person or object because they were distracted by using their phone. This is a up from the 17% of mobile owners who said that this had happened in 2010. In addition, 50% of cell owners say that they have been bumped into by another person because that person was distracted by using their own cellphone.
Young adults (in particular those ages 18-24) are especially prone to experience these “distracted walking” encounters. Half of these young cell owners (51%) have bumped into a person or object because they were busy paying attention to their phone, and 70% have been bumped into by another person who was distracted by using their own cellphone.
According to the National Safety Council’s (NSC) Injury Facts 2015 report, distracted walking caused over 11,000 injuries between 2000 and 2011. Of all the people injured in distracted walking accidents, more than half were age 40 or younger.
In Japan, the mobile giant NTT Docomo released a simulation (2014) of what would happen there if everyone crossing was doing the smartphone walk. It concluded that there would be more than 400 collisions every time, and most likely just 36% of people would get across.
People are so addicted to their mobile phones that they would rather engage in their screens than their actual surroundings.
An increasing number of fatalities are happening around the world as people blindly walk into intersections, cars, people, and off cliffs.
Governments are having to shell out millions of dollars to create campaigns to combat dumbwalking.
Dumbwalking won't be a problem for long as people get used to using their mobile device while walking.
People who are more concerned by what is going on on their phone than the actual physical environment shouldn't have cellphones.