Always practise safe text: the German traffic light for smartphone zombies

In Germany, they call them smombies - smartphone users who stagger about cities like zombies, oblivious to the risk. Now the city of Augsburg is fighting back

The word "smombie" is one of the most recent additions to the German language. Last November, the term - a mashup of "smartphone" and "zombie", referring to oblivious smartphone users staggering around cities like the undead - was voted Youth Word of the Year in Germany.

The disease is virulent. A recent study of 14,000 pedestrians in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Rome and Stockholm found that 17% of people used their smartphone while walking. The heaviest users were 25 to 35-year-olds: almost a quarter of them exhibited smombie-esque behaviour.