Pokémon Go’ Highway Warnings

In 2016, Pokémon released their mobile game titled ‘Pokémon Go’ which became a cultural phenomenon immediately on the day of release. At the end of the year the game accumulated 500 million downloads.

The basis of the game is to walk around your town using the built in GPS and augmented reality to catch Pokémon in the real world while mashing in the fantasy.

Players decided to find other ways to play efficiently to collect as much as possible, which resulted in playing while driving.

In 2017, a detailed look at accident reports showed that there was a 26.5% increase in accidents near ‘Pokéstops.!’ This study from Purdue University looked at nearly 12,000 accident reports in Tippecanoe County, Indiana in the months before Pokémon Go was released and in the months that followed.

This finding was statistically significant, and it added up to nearly $500,000 in vehicle damage, 31 injuries, and at least 2 deaths. If one extrapolates this county’s results across the United States, authors speculate that playing Pokémon Go was responsible for more than 145,000 crashes, 29,000 injuries, and 250 additional deaths in the 5-month period after the game was introduced.