Separate lanes for cycles, bikes and slow-moving vehicles are not new or innovate – they have been existent the world over for a long time – but now Chongqing, a major city in southwest China has set apart an exclusively lane [photo below] for use by mobile addicts.
With more and more people using mobile phones on streets in China, it has become a major issue in China. Though the idea of a separate lane for mobile users is being put to use here is the first of its kind, it is not an innovative idea as such a similar thing showed up on a television programme that ran on the National Geographic channel earlier this year. The programme revealed that few people changed lanes to take a mobile phone call, say experimenters.
Chinese officials however have a different objective it seems. They say that the decision to have a separate lane for mobile users on the streets is to educate pedestrians about the perils of its use.
One user posted on Weibo, a Chinese website like the Twitter, “Am I supposed to jump to the other side of the path when I get an incoming phone call?” and yet another commented “Maybe they can even build one traffic lane especially for drunk drivers in the future,”
The decision to set apart an exclusively lane has created another problem however; hordes of people stop on the lane to take photos of the pavement causing street congestion.
