[B’ Spokes: I know I covered this topic already but besides the points I am going to highlight it is important to created “buzz” on this subject because Maryland is an epicenter for this wrong kind of thinking.]
Written by Lloyd Alter
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I have been looking at the coverage of this story, and reading the comments. The headlines run the gamut:
Pedestrians wearing headphones at risk
Distracted Pedestrians: Technology Produces New Deadly Trend
Why headphones are hazardous to your health
So do the comments. My favourite :
Why are there even pedestrians anyway? I drive everywhere I go and I do NOT walk around in areas where I can be hit by a car unless absolutely unavoidable.
In every single article I read, there was not a single note or comment pointing out that these people are being hit and killed by cars. The headphones don’t kill people, cars are killing people. The study doesn’t say who had who had right of way, it simply points out that the number of pedestrians killed while wearing headphones has increased. Yet everyone is blaming the victim for wearing headphones.
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There is another point to be gleaned from this table in the study. While the number of people getting killed by cars while wearing headphones had tripled in six years, the actual number of people wearing MP3 players has quadrupled. So in fact, the rate at which pedestrians wearing headphones are being killed is actually going down.
The authors of the study list a number of limitations, including that “since this is a retrospective case series, neither causation nor correlation can be established between headphone use and pedestrian risk.” Another one might be the fact that:
it relies on media reporting, which likely over-publishes tragic events but vastly under-publishes non-fatal cases. …… Our capture of the cases in this study required headphones to be mentioned, information that may or may not be available to reporters at the scene.
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Continue reading “Death by Headphones?”
