Smartphone zombies - the modern urban nightmare

Because, probably, it interferes with its nation's world-renown public transport punctuality, the German city of Augsburg has come up with a clever way to stop people getting inconveniently hit by trams when crossing roads while glued to their smartphones. The city, which lies some 50 miles north-west of Munich, is trialling the use of red LEDs embedded into the ground on pedestrian crossings which flash when a tram is approaching. "It creates a whole new level of attention," an Augsburg city spokesman told the German news organisation N-TV.

According to the DEKRA Accident Research institute, 17 per cent of people on European streets use their smartphones in road traffic. One of DEKRA's researchers, Clemens Klinke, said one incident in Stockholm made a particular impression. "A young girl stood in the middle of the road, got her phone out and started texting," he told the Daily Telegraph. "It wasn’t until a bus driver sounded his horn that she realised where she was standing." Sadly, a 15-year-old in Munich wasn't so lucky last month, killed by a tram while crossing a road wearing headphones and looking at her phone.

Tragic as that was, it is sadly a symptom of the mindless attachment we have to our smartphones, and the equally mindless distraction it causes. Germans even now have a word for it - "smombies". How often do you have to step out of the way because someone is walking towards you more interested in their call or texting than looking where they're going? That might merely be an annoyance, but when people get killed by ignoring basic road safety, then being glued to a smartphone on the street is not so smart.

The smartphone has become the indispensible tool of our age. We can't go anywhere without it, we can't sit down to dinner without having one at hand, and have even started to lose our basic navigation skills because of our reliance on phone-based navigation apps. I've posted before on how anti-social phones have become, but the fact that a German city needs to install flashing lights in addition to the skill we're all taught as children of looking both ways before we cross a road, over-reliance on phones is becoming a public safety nuisance too.

The part that worries me the most, however, is how smartphones cut people off from the world, oblivious to it, others and things (trams included). For as long as I've been commuting to work, the "personal stereo" has been a blessing and a curse - a comfort to shut out the frequent horrors of overcrowded public transport, a nightmare when it involves hissy music leaking from headphones. Last week I briefly returned to commuting in London after a 17-year break, and noted how, with standing room-only on the 0711 to Waterloo, everyone to a man and woman was hunched over a smartphone, idly thumbing through e-mails or tweets or Candy Crush or whatever it was that they were doing. At least, though, they weren't getting in anyone's way.

But walk down a busy street, however, and it's impossible not to get stuck behind a zombie texter, or have your progress climbing stairs after getting off an underground train impeded by some idiot desperate to refresh their inbox as soon as a whisp of reception can be attained. Here is where the Chinese had a capital idea two years ago: the city of Chongqing became the first place in the world to create a dedicated walking lane for pedestrians hooked to their phones, with 100ft of pavement was marked with special paint and the sign "cellphone" for those wishing to dawdle along with their devices, and another "no cellphones" pathway for those wishing to go about their business freely.

In tech-mad Tokyo the problem is even more acute. The notorious melee of people traversing the pedestrian crossing at Shibuya Station has become even more hazardous due to the hundreds of people paying more attention to their phones than those around them. According to a report by the AFP news agency, incidents in Tokyo involving pedestrians or cyclists account for 41% of all phone-related accidents. Some 122 people were taken to hospital between 2009 and 2013 as a result of accidents caused by pedestrians using mobile phones.

That a teenager in Munich should have been killed by not seeing a tram coming is, sadly, no surprise. The Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo conducted research into safe use of smartphones and found that the average field of vision while staring down at one is just 5% of the normal view. Using computer simulation, NTT found that, based on an average of 1500 people on the Shibuya crosswalk at any given time, if they were all looking at their phones there would be 446 collisions, 103 falling to the floor and 21 phones being dropped.

As someone who spends most of his travelling life plugged into his iPhone listening to music and podcasts, I'm as guilty as anyone in any of these cities for shutting out the world. But I do at least reserve a little - some might say smugly so - awareness of when I'm inconveniencing others. Because nothing you read, hear or watch on your smartphone should be worth putting your life at risk. Should it?