$50 fine: Texting while walking in Idaho. $50 fine: Texting while walking- MSN Money
Laws that forbid texting while driving are as common as a 
on your cellphone, but Rexburg, a small college town in southeastern Idaho, may be the first place to also ban texting while walking.
Officially, only texting while crossing a street is illegal. Which raises a question: If you are so engrossed in texting that you fail to notice that a bright-red 4,000-pound pickup is bearing down on you at 35 mph, how likely is it that you would realize you have left the sidewalk and entered the street?
OK, the real question is whether such a law is even needed. According to reports, there have been no accidents, just a few "close calls," in Rexburg, mostly near the campus of Brigham Young University-Idaho.
While there is no data available on the dangers of texting while walking, a 2010 study by the Highway Loss Data Institute showed that texting-while-driving bans actually appear to increase the number of crashes.
"Texting bans haven't reduced crashes at all," Adrian Lund, president of the HLDI and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said in a news release. "In a perverse twist, crashes increased in three of the four states we studied after bans were enacted. Post continues after video.
