Japanese mobes to stop punters TXTing themselves under a bus Japanese carrier Docomo will this week launch a new service designed to help wean customers off that anti-social habit of using their smartphone whilst walking, by effectively blocking the device when used on the move. The Japanese carrier said it will introduce its free anshin-mode, or “safety mode”, service on Thursday. If …
The problem is the hold up for everyone else. I was near Kilburn station once when something like that happened. It was said that the train driver never worked again, it took months of work to sort out the track which moved when the train did an unsuccessful emergency stop.
I am all for removing the stupid from the gene pool, but please do it responsibly.
In the tube stations they could do what some of the French underground does, full length, full height plastic barriers. The barriers have doors which open only when the train is at a standstill and close before the train moves of... It avoids all of those meat-bag accidents....
Here is an example of a barriere
The stupid will eventually remove themselves and hopefully without any collateral damage..
The barriers do add their own failure modes - one sweltering summer evening rush hour on the Jubilee Line someone pressed the emergency stop just as the train started moving. Safety rules say "train will halt at current station as long as any part remains within the station" (so you can evacuate to where you are right now rather than trusting to get safely to next station), so train stops. Driver is then required to personally verify the cause of the stop and reset the switch, normally he'd do this by getting to the platform as quickly as possible (his door, or the first accessible passenger door) and jogging back to the carriage with the problem, but because the track and train doors were already offset he had to squeeze through the length of half a dozen sweaty sardine cans, and back again, by which time my carriage felt like a hothouse stocked with corpse flowers.
(of course in a true emergency one can smash out the track windows but I imagine he'd already heard from the perpetrator "I lost my balance and grabbed the handle")
"The problem is the hold up for everyone else. I was near Kilburn station once when something like that happened. It was said that the train driver never worked again, it took months of work to sort out the track which moved when the train did an unsuccessful emergency stop.
I am all for removing the stupid from the gene pool, but please do it responsibly."
How do you propose we do that then? Stop people texting while walking? How?
If this system was mandatory, their would be an out cry.
"One of the images depicts a cheery looking user happily on his phone whilst walking in front of a train - clearly multi-tasking is a dirty word in Docomo HQ"
Lets not confuse multi-tasking with dangerous activity! Else you make yourself look rather dim.
Ultimately, you deserve to die if you willingly put yourself in a dangerous situation. I feel no shame in saying that, no one else is responsible for your own safety.
Perhaps Docomo could donate it to the world, or at least Google Android users, as a humanitarian gesture.
Walking potential dead is a world-wide phenomena. Perhaps someone can work on an App for motorcycle drivers, too.
We have over 4-million motorcycles here in Ho Chi Minh City and most seem to text whilst driving!
P.S. Why do people hold the cell in the left hand and hold it against the right-hand ear? Vietnamese drivers routinely stick the cell handsets under their safety helmet straps and talk whilst using both hands for driving.
Seriously, how does this thing detect walking...? While I understand a phone attached to my belt might see periodic acceleration in a specific pattern, a phone in my hand doesn't move all that much at all when I'm walking - accelerometers can't detect steady movement... as for GPS detection, let's not even go there - I never ever enable mine unless I'm actively using a map.
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