University creates ‘texting lane’ for distracted walkers

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The zombies weave, speed up, slow down, their eyes beady and intent on their screens, their faces bathed in a blue glow.

Now, they've landed their own special highway for it all. From Utah to China to Antwerp, "texting lanes" are proliferating. Painted on sidewalks and stairs, these lanes are for the mega-busy set.

At Utah Valley University, administrators splashed neon green labelling up a staircase: one lane for running, one for walking and one for texting.

"When you have 18- to 24-year-olds walking on campus glued to their smartphones, you're almost bound to run into someone somewhere; it's the nature of the world we live in," Matthew Bambrough, the school's creative director explained in a blog post. Bambrough said the texting lane was initially planned as a stunt to engage students, to "let them know we are aware of who they are and where they're coming from." (That's a depressing thought.)

"Texting lanes" have also popped up in Belgium, China, Philadelphia and Washington – in some cases as marketing stunts. In Washington, texters overlooked the lanes completely. "Many people actually using their phones did not notice the markings at all. Of course they wouldn't: They were staring, oblivious and glassy-eyed, at the screens of their mobile devices," this tech columnist observed.

Much has been made in the coverage of the accident risks of texting while walking, when everything but your phone becomes a blind spot. (Casey Neistat, the director of a short film about the etiquette gaffe, elucidated the proper way to text on public streets: Put your back against a wall and let foot traffic sail by unimpeded.)

The occasional bump aside, texting while walking says far more about our limitless distraction. Brigid Schulte, a Washington Post journalist and author of the book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, described our "always-on technological haze," one that "splinters the experience of time into thousands of little pieces."

Schulte believes we're on the bleeding edge of technology and haven't quite yet mastered it. "I think over time – I'm hoping – we'll adapt and become smarter about how we use technology. It is using us right now," Schulte told me in an interview last year. She's right. Exhibit A: our bottomless in-boxes. Exhibit B: being increasingly incapable of walking a short distance without scanning your digital dog leash.

Phone lanes also lay bare our absurd self-absorption. As one comedian put it on Twitter, "You wanted flying cars and hover boards? Sorry, you get texting lanes and selfie sticks." The future isn't cool, it's narcissistic.

The Globe's Ian Brown had another name for it: "techno-rudeness." "We tell ourselves personal technology is a personal matter, a private world of our own. I feel compelled to point out the obvious: It's not," Brown wrote last November, when a treacherous dump of snow forced people to look up from their screens at other humans in real life.

One thing the texting lanes might actually be good for, if zombies even notice them? Public shaming – segregating the most self-important among us into a special stream, for all to see.