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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

It's 100% texting, both drivers and pedestrians.

Maybe this is a cause of the increase. But the root cause itself is the really abysmal way we design our streets that creates unsafe conditions. The Not Just Bikes channel addresses this frequently with examples from The Netherlands where they have a stronger focus on acknowledging humans suck and designing for safety, e.g: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra_0DgnJ1uQ

I see a depressing number of folks infinite scrolling, eyes glued to their screens, while walking in public.

Texting is too specific, it's smartphones in general...

I walk a lot and have to regularly deal with distracted or dysfunctional drivers as I cross multiple busy roads and poorly designed intersections regularly. Very few incidents that I experience involve drivers looking at phones, under 10%. Usually it's people zoned out, or only looking at where they want to go, or just not giving a shit.

I don't use my phone when I'm walking.

Sure, I’m not saying all pedestrian deaths are because of phones, but the sharp increase in recent years is mostly phones.

>It's 100% texting, both drivers and pedestrians.

This is unfortunately very true, even for societies which are much more sensitive to this issue. As a regular cyclist in my hometown of Berlin/Germany I sometimes see so much as every third car driver looking at or obviously typing on their phone although this is illegal and of course dangerous.

I only commute by bike in Paris, France. The infrastructure has so much improved that if the city continues to protect bikes and pedestrians, there will be a point where I don't care if drivers aren't attentive (thanks to protected bike lanes everywhere, larger sidewalks, car max speed soon limited to 30 km/h on all streets, Idaho stop for bikes at almost all traffic lights, car ban in some districts on Sundays, no more "send uniques" for bikes, better signs, camera and speed traps, "coronapistes" that duplicate the subway map, etc).

I generalize but infrastrucures changes everything to a point where a city can easily get rid off car (give us a few years...). It's all infra since that's the only thing that changed here in the past decade: we finally dare to bike now, only because it's protected enough we don'fear for our life every few meters nowadays. For this reason, biking has become the default for most of my friends and colleagues. And the last few who haven't swichted are either taking the metro/RER or walking. The last drivers are professionals (who need to move heavy things and the infra does not support electric cargo bikes yet), old and fuck-you-momey rich boomers who still see biking as being weak, some families (who can afford to still live in Paris?!) but same issue as cargo bikes, and lost tourists (why the hell do huuuge tourist buses are allowed in so dense blocks?!).

There have been some trials of cameras that detect phone usage. They ran one just as an experiment in Australia and found on one road in one day they found hundreds of phone users driving.

I haven’t heard of any of them being put in place for actual enforcement yet though.

Yeah, blaming other people is a great way to get no improvement ever. What could you, personally, do differently to reduce the risk of causing pedestrian fatalities? Why aren't you?

Well, one, is personally, I have texted and driven before, and I don't do that anymore, because I rear-ended a person while doing it. The temptation is too high so I put the phone in the trunk while I drive.

Second, I support any legislation to penalize texting and driving with penalties similar to or beyond what drunk driving currently gets. I am happy to support a criminal penalty of second-degree murder (i.e. ~25 years in prison) for impaired driving leading to death.

What more can I do? I'm happy to.

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