Take cell phones danger to pedestrians herds?.

Mobile phone and MP3 player are happy suspected of pedestrian traffic off and then to cause accidents. The suspect follows a scheme that is already a hundred years ago. Pedestrians were then read as a traffic hazard.
  U.S. Senator Carl Kruger was in the past year for a brief moment the world famous - he wanted to use the iPod on all roads of the U.S. state of New York ban. The Reuters news agency said Kruger, 2007, the users of iPods, mobile phones and portable game consoles would be "remotely as in cars and buses run into." That was a "country-wide problem." Here he was, by his concerns so confident that he even as a bill in the U.S. Senate revenue.
Now was the campaign of Senator alone therefore agreed Obskurität because the prohibition to explicitly refer to Apple's iPod and not on the MP3 player manufacturers. But beyond this detail was the idea of a gadget-ban road to increase doomed to failure.
Because even if the cause was relatively current, is the scheme very well. The cliché of the reach pedestrian, the seemingly blind on the road running, is exactly as old as the motorized traffic.
Well-known scheme
The story of the unwitting passers explains science historian Peter Norton detail in his book "Fighting Traffic." "SMS is writing something new, something known to, namely the road, encounters, and initially no one knows how the two things together in harmony can bring," said Norton now to Cellular News. "
It makes loud Norton in principle no difference whether the distraction of a text message on your mobile phone or music from your iPod runs out. One hundred years ago was in any case books the same role as a pedestrian hazard attributed as the iPod last year by Senator Kruger.
This attribution can be loud Norton clearly based on newspaper reports and cartoons show. Whether pedestrians actually read a significant number of accidents caused, on the other hand, remains in the dark, because there is no meaningful data.
Bad timing
At once agreed, perceived or real problem, according to Norton follows as a first response to the call for a ban. The reading of books on the street to prohibit, however, was Mission impossible. And even where such local laws were adopted. The existing bans could be enforced anywhere, and simple and moving, because the read passers lacked awareness of the injustice.
IN COOPERATION WITH ... de BugMagazin for electronic Lebensaspektewww.de-bug.deUm this injustice to generate awareness, was in the U.S. even with great effort of the term "Jaywalker" established. For this there is no direct correlation Germans, mutatis mutandis Jaywalker called a "careless pedestrians."
As the previously unknown word 1924 entrance into the dictionaries took place, was the idea of Leseverbot for pedestrians, however, already been forgotten. Nevertheless, the establishment of the concept of awareness on the problem and thus also to defuse the situation have contributed to it, says author Norton. Write to SMS-end pedestrian he therefore proposes the term "Textlemminge" before.
Senator Carl Kruger for this proposal comes too late, his legislative initiative has failed miserably.