City authorities in Chongqing have introduced a 100ft ‘cellphone lane’ for pedestrians – is it a step too far in the name of public safety?




In Chongqing, China, with a degree of seriousness that has yet to be determined, the city authorities have designated a 100ft “cellphone lane” for people who use their phones while walking. “First mobile phone sidewalks in China,” declares a notice next to it.

In fact, the Chongqing phone lane seems to be almost a direct copy of one that was painted on to 18th Street, Washington DC, in July. The Washington version was created for an experiment into crowd behaviour by the National Geographic TV channel. Which is a clue that the seriousness of the Chinese version may be below 100%.


The scheme also raises some fairly obvious questions. How will people so distracted by their phones that they are bumping into lampposts manage to stay within the lines of the lane? Even if they do, why will they not bump into each other all the time, or walk straight into the road when the lane finishes? How, for that matter, will they even notice the existence of the lane in the first place? Casual observers of the Washington experiment suggested that many phone-users just ignored it, but perhaps annoying Chinese people will prove more law-abiding than annoying Americans.

And yet there does seem to be some pressure building behind the idea that “distracted walking”, as it is known, is a real problem. In 2012, the city of Philadelphia announced what it called an “e-lane” for smartphone users. In fact the pilot scheme turned out to be an April fool, albeit one designed to raise a serious public safety issue.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/sep/15/china-mobile-phone-lane-distracted-walking-pedestrians?CMP=twt_gu

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