This is the lede buried in an AP article about distracted walking (something I wrote about last week):
As an April Fool's Day joke with a serious message, Philadelphia officials taped off an "e-lane" for distracted pedestrians on a sidewalk outside downtown office buildings.
Some didn't get that it was a joke.
"The sad part is we had people who, once they realized we were going to take the e-lane away, got mad because they thought it was really helpful to not have people get in their way while they were walking and texting," [deputy mayor Rina] Cutler said.
She added, "One of the messages will certainly be 'pick your head up'-- I want to say 'nitwit,' but I probably shouldn't call them names."
Though given that last year, a textestrian* fell off a subway platform in Philadelphia, maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea. However, this does appear to be turning into A Thing:
A University of Maryland study found 116 cases over six years in which pedestrians were killed or seriously injured while wearing headphones. In two-thirds of the cases the victims were men under age 30. Half the cases involved trains. In a third of the incidents, a warning horn was sounded just before the accident….
About 1,152 people were treated in hospital emergency rooms in the U.S. last year for injuries suffered while walking and using a cellphone or some other electronic device, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which receives annual data from 100 emergency rooms and extrapolates the information into a national estimate. But that's likely an underestimate because patients may not mention they were using a cellphone or other device at the time at the time they were injured, or the doctor or nurse may neglect to include the information in their report, said Tom Schroeder, director of the commission's data systems.
The cases include a 24-year-old woman who walked into a telephone pole while texting; a 28-year-old man who was walking along a road when he fell into a ditch while talking on a cellphone; a 12-year-old boy who was looking at a video game when he was clipped by a pickup truck as he crossed the street; and a 53-year-old woman who fell off a curb while texting and lacerated her face.
*I officially propose "textestrians" as the term for texting pedestrians. You're welcome.
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