“Text Walking Lanes” Introduced in Antwerp

Are you fed up of being stuck behind slow walking people who are more interested in staring at their phone that looking where they are going? Or perhaps you’re more interested in starting at your phone and you’re fed up of fast walking people barging past you while you’re trying to like your friends dank memes on Facebook? Either way, you’re going to love and possibly also hate these new text walking lanes!

The lanes were simply painted onto the street, giving those texting a slight safer route to walk though. The lanes were created by Mlab, who say they repair up to 35,000 mobiles a day, many of which are broken by collisions while text-walking. That sounds odd to me though, surely this would hurt their business?

An Mlab spokesperson says: “everyone textwalks. You probably walk through the streets while texting or sending Whatsapp messages to your friends and don’t really pay attention to your surroundings, only to whatever is happening on your screen. This causes collisions with poles or other pedestrians. You could, unknowingly, even be endangering your own life while you ‘textwalk’ when you cross the street without looking up.”

I’m not sure I support this idea entirely, it seems like a PR stunt, albeit one where I can’t quite grasp what is being sold. A simpler solution would be to look where you are going. After all, even the woman in the picture above isn’t paying attention to where the lane actually is.