A new study by a Palo Alto marketing firm has calculated that any given motorist loses a total of 19.5 minutes each year as they delay making a right turn to allow time for pedestrians engrossed in their smartphones to look up and realize they have the walk signal.
“It’s not like I would deliberately try to lightly scrape these morons across the calf with my bumper just to teach them a lesson” said Peter Evans, a Grand Rapids driver who was interviewed about the survey results. “But it would be great to be able to lightly scrape these morons across the calf with my bumper just to teach them a lesson.”
The reaction is typical among automobile users, who, before the study revealed the extent of the inconvenience caused by these zombie-like pedestrians, had not given too much thought to the cumulative amount of time that was being taken from them on an annual basis by these duh-inspired delays.
“It can take a clueless, device-preoccupied pedestrian anywhere from three to sixteen seconds to become aware of the world around him and look up,” notes the study’s lead researcher, Kim Longford. “Often it is the mind’s subconscious registering of a slight change in road noise that makes smartphone users at last key into their surroundings and realize that perhaps traffic going one way has stopped.”
But in those crucial seconds, drivers have no alternative but to wait for the hapless pedestrian to return to reality.
“I’ve tried honking my horn at them,” declares Beverly Winstead, a Eugene Lyft driver whose job relies on promptness. “But they are usually so out of it that they assume the horn is meant for another car and not for them.”
“On the surface, it is only a matter of seconds each time,” says Longford, “but to discover that one can lose almost twenty minutes in total to these slack-jawed, screen-happy idiots is quite a shocking revelation.”
“Yeah,” one anonymous motorist added, “in those twenty minutes I could send a lot of texts while driving, and that’s just an unconscionable waste of my precious time.”