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'Don't drive and Pokémon,' road signs warn

Michelle Avenant
By Michelle Avenant, portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 27 Jul 2016
Eleven electronic road signs across Melbourne, Australia warn motorists not to play Pokémon Go while driving.
Eleven electronic road signs across Melbourne, Australia warn motorists not to play Pokémon Go while driving.

An Australian transit authority has configured 11 electronic road signs in the city of Melbourne to warn motorists not to play Pokémon Go while driving.

The signs - the work of VicRoads, a transit authority of the state of Victoria - read "don't drive and Pokémon".

A global wave of Pokémon Go-related transit accidents has been observed following the release of the engrossing, GPS-enabled, augmented reality mobile game, which necessitates that players travel around their real-life surroundings to find and battle Pokémon (short for "pocket monsters").

The Japan Times reports a number of accidents in Japan involving cyclists and motorists playing the game and neglecting to properly control their vehicles. Nobody involved was seriously injured.

In perhaps the most notorious Pokémon Go-related motor accident in the US so far, a driver distracted by the mobile game slammed into an empty, parked police car in Baltimore, Maryland. Nobody was injured, although both cars were damaged.

While Pokémon Go is only three weeks old, playing it while driving is already illegal in many countries, as it falls under the illicit activity of using a smartphone while driving.

The game could also prove dangerous for pedestrians, who have already been found to hurt themselves by walking into oncoming traffic, walls, or poles, or tripping over obstructions or falling down stairs, while engrossed in their phones.

Yet while irresponsible Pokémon Go players are a danger to those sharing their roads, hostile attitudes towards those playing the game can also prove harmful. The Bangor Daily News of Bangor in Maine, US reports an incident in which a driver purposefully ran over a pedestrian playing Pokémon Go at a crosswalk. "She said, 'do you want to get hit?'... backed up a good 20 feet... sped forward and hit him... the man went up and over the car," the news sites quotes a witness.

The injured pedestrian was first assisted by an off-duty nurse and a paramedic, who was parked nearby playing Pokémon Go at the time, the Bangor Daily News adds.

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