by Charles Komanoff, Streets Blog
\nHospital records from 2014 showed that distracted walking accounted for 78% of pedestrian injuries throughout the United States.
\n\u2014 Daily News, Sunday, March 27, 2016
\nA report released in 2015 by the Governors Highway Safety Association found an increase in pedestrian fatalities, and cited texting while walking as partly to blame. Nearly two million pedestrian injuries were related to cellphone use, the report said.
\n\u2014 Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, March 25, 2016
\nAttempts to repress human-powered movement invariably arise from three elements: a penchant for victim-blaming, officials\u2019 \u201cwindshield perspective\u201d that marginalizes and devalues people outside cars, and dubious statistics.
\n…
\nRebutting the claim that distracted walking accounts for 78 percent of U.S. pedestrian injuries
\n… Unremarked in that sentence, however, is that the study in question was not looking at all pedestrian injuries, but only pedestrian injuries related to mobile phones. We thus have the unremarkable finding that most pedestrians who were using a mobile phone when they were injured in traffic crashes were talking or texting \u2014 as opposed to, say, switching playlists or posting on Twitter.
\n…
\nRebutting the claim that nearly two million pedestrian injuries a year involve pedestrians\u2019 cellphone use
\n…
\nHere\u2019s where it gets weird. …
\nThat could be the wildest extrapolation you\u2019ll see in any peer-reviewed journal this decade. \u201cOnly\u201d 66,000 pedestrian injuries a year are recorded in official U.S. traffic crash data, yet the AA&P authors speculate that there may be 30 times as many attributable to mobile phone usage alone.
\n…
\n\u201cVictim blaming is a subtle process, cloaked in kindness and concern,\u201d wrote sociologist William Ryan over four decades ago. Battling victim-blaming along with the pervasive windshield perspective is hard enough without having to contend with bogus \u201cstatistics\u201d as well. The Governors Highway Safety Association and Accident Analysis & Prevention have some soul-searching to do.
\nhttps:\/\/www.streetsblog.org\/2016\/03\/31\/inside-the-latest-distracted-pedestrians-con<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Charles Komanoff, Streets Blog Hospital records from 2014 showed that distracted walking accounted for 78% of pedestrian injuries throughout the United States. \u2014 Daily News, Sunday, March 27, 2016 A report released in 2015 by the Governors Highway Safety Association found an increase in pedestrian fatalities, and cited texting while walking as partly to … <\/p>\n