By Kim Smiley

By now, most of us have heard about the dangers of distracted driving and many states have laws restricting the use of cellphones while driving.  But did you know that walking while distracted is also a potentially dangerous habit?  Researchers observed people crossing the street at busy intersections and determined that people using cellphones or listening to music were significantly more likely to do something risky.  More study needs to be done to understand exactly how distracted walking might be contributing to actual accidents, but it is known that the number of pedestrians killed and injured last year increased from 2010.

This issue can be analyzed by building a Cause Map, a visual, intuitive method for performing a root cause analysis.  The first step in building a Cause Map is to complete an Outline that lists all the basic information about an issue.  The bottom portion of the Outline should also be filled in with how the issue impacts the overall goals.  In this example, there was an increase in pedestrians’ deaths which is obviously an impact to the safety goal and there would be more traffic disruptions because there are more pedestrian accidents occurring.  The next step is to ask “why” questions to determine the causes that contributed to an issue.  The causes are then visually laid out on the Cause Map to show cause-and-effect relationships between them.  Click on “Download PDF” above to view an Outline and high level Cause Map of this issue.

Starting with the safety goal, the Cause Map shows that the number of pedestrians killed has occurred because of the increase in pedestrian accidents.   More research is needed to determine exactly why the number of pedestrian accidents is increasing, but there are a couple of likely causes that should be evaluated.  Based on the evidence that distracted pedestrians act in a risky way, such as not looking  both ways and crossing slower, it’s likely that is a contributing cause.  Use of cellphones, both to talk and text, and the use of headphones is becoming increasinglycommon in our culture so it would be worth researching if this has in fact contributed to increase in pedestrian accidents.  Since it still requires research to validate this cause, it is listed on the Cause Map, but a “?” is included to show that it haven’t been confirmed.  As more information is available, the Cause Map can be updated to reflect any new information.

Some solutions to this problem have already been proposed such as laws restricting cellphone use while walking similar to the distracted driving laws and public awareness campaigns since this issue hasn’t been highly publicized.  The report by the researchers who observed pedestrian habits can be viewed here.