Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Belgian City Designates Lane for 'Text Walkers'

A Belgian city believes it has come up with a solution to the problem of pedestrians bumping into other people because they're texting while walking.

Antwerp has given smartphone users their own designated walking lanes marked 'text walking lane’ on several busy pedestrian shopping streets.

The lanes were the idea of a local mobile phone business, Mlab, which says many smartphones are broken in collisions between pedestrians.

No worries though, there are now believed to be more mobile phones in the world than people. There are about 7.5 billion mobiles, according to data provided by telecommunications companies. In comparison, the global population is estimated at 7.2 billion.

So my question is, since people are paying attention only to their phone and not their surroundings when 'text walking,' what's to keep them from wandering out of their lane and into others, just as before?

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About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.