The young woman looked up briefly before she stepped from the sidewalk to cross Punchbowl Street, but as soon as she noted that the car in the lane nearest her was slowing, she went head down again.

Her thumb worked furiously on the device she held in her hand. Midway through her journey, she came to a full stop, staring at the little screen of her smartphone, cellphone, BlackBerry or whatever it was. After a couple of beats, she blithely continued past a wall of waiting cars, including my trusty Toyota, to the relative safety of the curb.

At the supermarket, another woman narrowly avoided a breach of grocery store decorum — ramming other shoppers — as she texted and pushed her cart simultaneously. Her zigzagging up, then down, the cereal aisle displayed inefficient multitasking. I guessed that the texting had become a failure to communicate when she finally stabbed at a button, put device to ear and wailed to her call recipient, "I know, Chex. Which one?"

No doubt we’ve all had similar encounters with pesky text junkies and might not consider it a matter of concern. In a country where almost weekly, gun-toting misfits and fantasists go on killing sprees, where people struggle to find work and fall further away from gaining a small measure of prosperity, in a city where conflict about a rail project has sucked all the air from what should be a multi-issue mayoral election, the problem of distracted walking does not reach priority status.

Even so, government officials and safety experts say it is growing and dangerous. Hospital emergency rooms report that distracted-walker injuries have more than quadrupled in recent years and though no agency or organization has firm data, anecdotal evidence indicates that more pedestrian accidents now involve electronic distractions.

In Philadelphia, officials devising a campaign to get people to pay attention to their surroundings prefaced it on April Fool’s Day with a joke. They taped an "e-lane" for phone-faced pedestrians on a downtown sidewalk. When told it was a stunt to get a message across, some people were annoyed.

Rina Cutler, a deputy mayor, said there were people "who, once they realized we were going to take the e-lane away, got mad because they thought it was really helpful to not have people get in their way while they were walking and texting."

Not to have people get in their way? Well, excuse me. Getting along requires a bit of polite behavior, which means one should not trample a child’s toes or jostle an elderly person because a text message is coming in.

Besides the matter of courtesy and common sense, there’s the message itself. It amazes me that people have so many meaningful things to communicate that they absolutely must push buttons continuously. It amazes me that they turn to cellphones while in front of them the Pacific Ocean frilled by the sweeping Koolaus fill sight lines.

That’s their choice. However, using their devices while on city streets and walkways may one day be limited as lawmakers and government leaders, like the authorities in Salt Lake City, look to ban electronic distractions as risky behavior. It happened with cars and cellphones.

Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com.