The number of teenaged pedestrians injured by cars rose 25 percent between 2006-2010, and distraction by texting is being blamed.
A non-profit organisation based in Washington DC, Safe Kids Worldwide, has just released findings of its research, and cites ' the use of electronics and handheld devices while walking' as the cause of the rise, in a period when such accidents have dropped in almost every other age group.
Other research has shown that teens send and receive an average of 110 text messages daily, and in a 2009 study in the journal Pediatrics, University of Alabama researchers put 77 children aged 10 to 11 through a street-crossing simulation. When distracted by conversations, kids were less attentive to traffic and walked into more collisions and had more close calls with oncoming traffic.
