How stupid and smartphones go together in Hong Kong
Yonden Lhatoo compares Seoul’s effort to prevent accidents involving smartphone users on the streets with Hong Kong’s total unwillingness to do anything
Much as I hate to admit it, having never jumped on the bandwagon to admire all things South Korean, from assembly-line pop music and soppy soap operas to clone plastic surgery, cities like Seoul can still teach Hong Kong a thing or two.
This week, the South Korean capital launched a safety campaign for mobile phone zombies – those selfish, civically challenged individuals who shuffle around with their noses buried in the personal pacifiers that were once useful for making and taking calls.
Every pocket of civilisation on this planet has its share of this socially stunted species who create a public nuisance by impeding the flow of humanity. They’re a danger to themselves – which is fine by me, knock yourself out – but also to others as they cross streets, step on and off escalators, and board and alight from trains and buses with their faces glued to glowing touch screens.
South Korea is doing something about the fact that collisions between zombies and vehicles in the country have more than doubled in five years to around 1,000 reported cases in 2014.
Seoul, one of the world’s most wired cities and the capital of a country with a smartphone penetration rate of around 80 per cent of the population, has started putting up hundreds of warning signs. City officials are targeting black spots with the highest number of young pedestrians, having identified smartphone users in their teens to their 30s as the problem demographic.