Smart solutions are needed for smart problems. Since the introduction of smartphones, people have grown more and more dependent on them, spending practically all of their time staring at tiny screens.
Yes, keep your eyes on the road even as you cross it; you are one of them. Most likely, you are reading this on your smartphone.
A detail about South Korea has installed traffic lights on the streets for smartphone addicts
However, if you are using your phone and get into a minor, if not severe, car accident while crossing the street, it poses a serious risk to your life. However, South Korea has offered a clever remedy for the same. What they did was this.
There is a potential that you could miss the traffic signal if you are always looking down at your phone, even when you are crossing a road.
South Korea has placed both standard traffic lights on poles and ground-level traffic lights to address this issue.
A video of the new feature at a zebra crossing was tweeted by author Trung Phan.
“South Korea put pedestrian street lights on the ground because so many pedestrians were staring at phones,” reads the caption of the video.
Industrialist Shrinivas Dempo posted the same video on Twitter and referred to the individuals as “Smartphone Obsessed Zombies- Sombies.” “Sign of the times: Traffic signals move down to the level of the road at this intersection in Seoul so that persons they term “Smombies” (smartphone-obsessed zombies) can safely cross the street while using their smartphones,” he said.
The traffic lights were originally put in place on the street as part of a pilot project in 2019 due to the rise in accidents at pedestrian crossings.
In order to avoid having to glance up at the poles, it was designed to alert pedestrians when it is safe to cross the street as they simultaneously stare at their mobile devices and the ground.
The South Korean government, according to Independant, also implemented an alert system that year that notifies a person’s phone if he is about to cross a road with real-time traffic information.
