How Smartphones Make Pedestrians Stupid
Who knew that a smartphone could make you, well, stupid? 
Last week I was witness to something that seems to be commonplace around Fresno and Clovis. A woman and her young child stepped out into traffic without looking. The woman was busy on her smartphone and her child didn’t know any better. My attention was caught when I heard the sound of squealing rubber as a car had to come to a shuddering halt inches away from her. Unluckily for her, the irate driver was a police officer. I overheard him offer her two choices – to charge her with child endangerment or with jaywalking. He reamed her good for endangering her child and for paying no attention to the 2,000 pound vehicles coming and going around her.
I’d like to say this incident is rare, but it isn’t. If you live in Fresno or Clovis, chances are you’ve had to slam on your brakes a time or two because of a pedestrian who seems to materialize out of nowhere or who is too busy on their smartphone to pay attention to their surroundings. I’ve not seen this kind of pedestrian behavior elsewhere – it seems to be localized here to the Valley and it makes me wonder how we’ve gotten so stupid. What’s even more disconcerting is the fact that we’re teaching our children that it’s okay to not pay attention to vehicles.
I wasn’t going to write on this, but I witnessed a blatant example of smartphone-caused pedestrian stupidity again yesterday. I went to the Clovis Rodeo and enjoyed a day full of horses, bulls, sheep, and motorcycles. As I was leaving, I carefully edged my car out of the surrounding side streets. I was a little behind the bulk of the crowd, so there wasn’t as much foot traffic as others might experience. As I pulled up to a stoplight on the corner of 5th and Sunnyside, a man in his 20’s stood typing away on his smartphone. The light turned green and he stepped off the curb after glancing up. He never once looked around to see if there were any other dangers lurking. I watched as a car flew through the red light, missing him by only a couple of feet. Although he had the right-away, had the other car not been vigilant and swerved to avoid him, he would have been dead right. I was left with a sick feeling in my stomach, wondering why our phones have become more important to us than our own lives.
I looked up some statistics on this. According to the Wall Street Journal article published this past February, emergency room visits treating injuries from “distracted” pedestrians are up 124%. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), pedestrians are more often at fault in vehicle-pedestrian accidents. This data is alarming – and if statistics are this bad in other cities, and I have experienced the difference between driving in Fresno versus driving in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, and Las Vegas, the statistics for Fresno must be double what they are everywhere else. The next time you exit your car and begin to walk anywhere, ask yourself this – is what’s going on in your life as documented through your smartphone really so important that you’re willing to risk your life for it?
