Via a tweet from @psychodarwinist / Diana Fleischman:

One example of selection pressure against cell phone usage! http://t.co/YjowF9sW

I knew this was coming, in fact I predicted this as far back as 2008! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVrM3mX3aFo

Sometimes there shouldn't be a law.

I could agree to an extension of the jaywalking laws, i.e. the guy that hits you because you were a dumbass crossing the street and texting is not at fault.

The problem with a law like this is at some point it will be abused. Someone will be walking and texting at 8 p.m. on an uncrowded sidewalk and the cops will use it as an excuse to stop and frisk them.

You want to ban something dangerous on the sidewalks? Ban bicycles. The lycra-fetishists racing through the park dodging strollers and walkers are a menace.

Gog is cranky. Just found this obituary:

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/10/local/la-me-peter-bergman-20120310

$85? That's nuthin'. Oughta sic bears on them instead. A better deterrent and far more entertaining for others.

So I stop to text. While texting I shift my foot or step out of the way of, say, a person pushing a stroller. Did I just walk?

Slightly OT, but....

There was a thread here, in 2010, partly about not hogging the sidewalk with your friends or forcing people to get off the sidewalk. NumberSix said that when she stopped walking, near the edge of a narrow sidewalk, thus forcing two men to walk single file, at least one of them gave her a dirty look. My guess is that that man was used to stepping off the sidewalk for clueless women, didn't understand why women didn't return the favor, and didn't understand that he shouldn't have been that gallant in the first place. Getting hit by cars is, after all, a pretty common accident. Why should anyone have to risk it? (Besides, even when there's no traffic, it's just plain self-degrading to do that.)

It's here:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2010/09/01/you_see_rude_pe.html

Heck, I have been known to read books while walking. Granted, not on a crowded sidewalk, but still.

I still propose an upper limit on the total size of all laws. Something the size of a novel each for federal, state and local laws - written in plain English. Once it's full, if they want to add a new law, they'll have to delete an old one first.

After all, if ignorance of the law is no excuse, it ought to be possible for a normal human being to actually read through all the laws they are subject to.

I wonder how many legislators it will take to come up with a legal definition for "walking."

Apparently, the states need revenue.

It's a sidewalk, not a side-stop-while-you-text-your-girlfriend, and I will hate you if you make me leap out of the way to avoid you, but..."there ought to be a law!"?

That's what the numbnuts in Jersey City think -- adding to the illegalization of everything, as if that's a way to improve anything more than the state of the city's coffer's. They've banned texting while walking, and you'll get an $85 ticket if a cop has to ignore actual crime to punish you for it.

If you stop to text your girlfriend, you're not walking anymore, and thus not ticketable for texting while walking, right? Standing isn't walking.

But more relevantly, it looks - as far as I can tell - that they're actually giving out jaywalking tickets rather than this being a "new law". (The reporting is, as is usual, terrible, but that's what several of the various reports I found say.)

If that's so, the real problem is that - a new law is something you can fight to repeal, but if they're going to creatively enforce* the ban on jaywalking [which I looked up and quite sensibly only talks about being in the street when one should not be], that's both easy to fight in court, and hard to stop them doing.

* As in "apply it to things the statute simply doesn't ban".