A town in Germany has recently installed traffic lights in the pavement for those pedestrians too engrossed with their mobile phones to look up when walking down the street.
A trial program has just been launched near the University of Augsburg, where there are rows of red LED lights embedded in the pavement next to two nearby tram stops. When the tram crossing is closed to pedestrians, the lights start flashing red.
In fact, the Germans have even come up with a word for people glued to their mobile phones - smombies (‘smartphone zombies’).
The new initiative is said to have come after the death of a teenage girl in Augsburg who was killed after stepping in front of a tram while looking at her mobile phone. Two other people were injured in similar incidents in the area.
It’s certainly not the first time a city has attempted to use infrastructure to deal with the problem of pedestrians distracted by their smartphones. In Chongqing in China, a 165-foot stretch of pavement with two lanes was installed in 2014. One lane was for those with their smartphones, and the other was for those not using their devices.
A mobile Consumer Survey conducted by Deloitte in 2015 found that almost 80% of Australians surveyed own a smartphone.
Earlier this year, the RAA annual Street Smart program surveyed 7000 students in Adelaide and found that three out of five choose to walk with their headphones in their ears, despite knowing the dangers.
"Complacency is often a really dangerous thing. People think ‘I’m really just walking in my little suburban street and it's very quiet’, but that's when often these crashes can occur between cars and pedestrians that aren't fully paying attention," RAA Manager Ben Haythorpe told 891 ABC Adelaide.
In several overseas countries, fines are given to pedestrians texting while walking, including China, which even has marked lanes on footpaths for where people are permitted to walk.
According to figures from the Victorian Government’s Toward Zero campaign, 32 pedestrians lost their lives in the state in 2015 and worldwide, around 20% killed on roads are pedestrians.
Earlier this year during the Australian Open, the TAC launched a fashion-led campaign called The Look to urge more young people to be more alert when walking down the street.
"We want people to realise that the best look on the street is paying attention and that people should make the effort to put their phones away and engage with what's happening around them to avoid tragic accidents," TAC Road Safety Project Manager Sam Buckis says.