Texting and walking is a bad idea, a new study shows

A video of a man talking on a cellphone while walking along a subway platform is making its rounds online, highlighting the dangers of talking or texting on the phone while trying to walk:

This "phenomenon," if you will, called "distracted walking" is becoming a real problem for emergency rooms. A new study has shown that emergency room visits have quadrupled in the past seven years as a result of distracted walkers.

About 1,152 people were treated in hospital in 2011 for injuries they got while walking distracted.

As Forbes points out, there's a good chance the number of injuries treated in hospital is a gross underestimation of the number of people who were actually injured in text-and-walk related incidents.

"People forget that very basic lesson that we all learned in kindergarten: look both ways before you cross the street," Joan Lowy of The Associated Press said in an interview.

While we've heard plenty of funny (albeit cringe-worthy) stories of people getting into sticky situations while walking and using their phone, like this woman who fell off a pier, or the man show in the video who encountered a bear while texting, it's clear that this is becoming a real problem.

680 News go so far as to report that health officials in the U.S. are now warning people that texting and walking may be as dangerous as texting and driving, which has been banned in provinces and states throughout North America.

In fact, the problem has become so bad in parts of the United States, one New Jersey town has placed an outright ban on texting while walking.

It's still up in the air how most municipalities will deal with the problem, but there was one April Fool's Day joke in Philadelphia that turned out to be positively received by chronic walk-and-texters: the city designated an "e-lane" for those using their electronic device while walking so they could stay out of the way of those actually looking where they're going. When the city revealed that it was all a joke, Forbes reports that some people were actually disappointed when the e-lanes were taken away.