Last weekend, the New York Times published a story called “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body,” which pointed out that yoga-related emergency room visits more than doubled between 2001 and 2002. From 20 to 46. Yawn. (Read Baltimore’s popular yoga studio Charm City Yoga’s rebuttal to the article here.)
But what you may have missed during all the yoga-attacking (or yoga-defending) furor was a way-more-scary statistic from the same day’s paper: in 2008, more than a thousand pedestrians had to go to the emergency room because they were somehow injured while talking or texting on their cell phones. One thousand! And since that number had doubled each year since 2006, more recent years have probably seen even more people who were hurt by walking-while-texting.
But, hey, I’ve done it myself — probably within the past week. And since we’re probably not going to get people to stand still when they need to send a message (seeing as we can barely get folks to stop text and driving), maybe it’s best to just develop some ground rules. That’s what filmmaker Casey Neistat does in this video. He suggests that you pay attention to your blind spot (“everywhere is the blind spot”), don’t force other pedestrians to yield to you, and — if you can — force yourself to stop and lean against a wall before you send that message. It’s safer and less irritating for you, and for everyone else on the street. Plus, think of how embarrassing it would be to have to go to the hospital for a texting-related accident.
