Honolulu in Hawaii has become the first city in the world to ban people from looking at their phones or other digital devices while crossing roads. The law, passed in July in an attempt to reduce injuries and deaths that occur while people are distracted, came into force on Wednesday.
The Distracted Walking Law states that "no pedestrian shall cross a street or highway while viewing a mobile electronic device".
The National Safety Council in the US added "distracted walking" to a list of injury risks in 2015, the same year a study in the Journal of Safety Studies found that hundreds of American pedestrians a year were injured while engrossed in their phones.
Other countries have tried to find technological ways of dealing with the problem of "smartphone zombies", from , to but, crucially, are in the line of sight of someone looking at a telephone.
