OllyK

your right - furry **** are just not nice

Aztec Performance Ltd

iTrader: (234)

The use of mobile phones should carry some sort of licence penalty as otherwise people wouldnt care if they are caught if its just a financial fine. I know I use the mobile occasionally whilst driving and would be deterred by penalty points. The fines aren't a detterant.

Bob

jasey

Having said all the above - I was coming home one night and some **** had stopped to use his mobile phone just at the entrance to a sharp curve in the road. People had to drive round onto the other side in order to get past and cars coming the other way were swerving like **** to avoid them.


They should just ban ********* and women from the roads and be done with it .

Peccant

you couldn't handle them lol

Freak

Makes me laugh that you are free to smoke/eat/****/rummage for cds/eat a drive thru/pick your nose/read a map/fix your hair in the irror/fix your make up in the mirror or whatever while driving and no one gives a crap to be honest.
At a push for any of these things you might get done for driving without due care, but realistically thats not going to happen much .
Even speaking to a passenger is fine, which arguably is no different to holding a conversation on a phone.

But speaking on a phone? Ooh no.......terrible crime.
MUPPETS

Freak

In fact
Why not make it compulsory for people to only be out on the street if they are on a leash and with written permission.
Make everything illegal and ban EVERYTHING- and you need written permission 14 days in advance to any activity whatsoever- including breathing and taking a p1ss.

Comper100

100% Agree!

I once saw a a clip of a mini on "police camera action" driving along and the woman stuffed it into the back of a parked car. She wasn't on her mobile phone she was looking for a tape to go in the radio!

Nuff said!

Comper100

drumsterphil

iTrader: (1)

Having had a very close shave when a driver on a phone, who wasn't paying attention to anything but his conversation, decided to drive onto the r'bout without bothering to check if traffic was already on the r'bout and missed be by an inch after i took avoiding action I would welcome the use of penalty points if you're caught using a mobile.

Phone conversations take too much attention from the road. IMO it's not the same as listening to music as you have to concentrate and interact with the other person and due to poor reception (e.g) also takes more concentration than having a conversation with a passenger in the car.

OllyK

Agreed to an extent.

Mobiles were always covered under driving without due care anyway, as are the other things you mention. I would have been quite happy for the law to have remained as it was but for the Police to follow up and actually use it more if using a mobile (or any of the other activities) was affecting a person's standard of driving.

I am guessing the few Police left on the roads were having trouble prosecuting mobile usage and a few high profile accidents involving mobiles and screams from BRAKE et al to do something about it has resulted in a new law, that I suspect has actually prosecuted very few people (anybody got some stats, I haven't been able to find any) and achieved the square root of FA.

ajm

No need to specifically ban use of mobile phones when there is already an offense of driving without due care and attention. Obviously this requires common sense on the part of the officer, because if someone is driving perfectly whilst on the phone then what is the problem?

Andy Hall

I could die trying though

OllyK

Depends on the nature of the conversation to an extent. I tend to ignore what the misses is saying when I am driving on the grounds of safety, well that's my excuse anyway

ajm

I don't know whether its true or not but I heard somewhere that some eggheads did research on cockpit warnings in planes. The theory was that pilots would take more notice of recordings of their spouses as warnings. In actual fact they found out that the pilots are more likely to ignore/miss those warnings made in their spouses voice!

OllyK

Sounds about right. The screams of "they are braking" when the nearest car is little more than a dot on the horizon doesn't instill confidence!

Jap2Scrap

I've never even 'had a moment' whilst lighting a ciggie and driving. I think you'll find that most responsible people wouldn't light up whilst there's an element of danger to it. I either get the gf to light it for me, wait til I'm stationary or coasting along a clear stretch.

Had a few panics after lobbing it out the window only for it to blow onto the back seat ONLY KIDDING but it does happen I'm sure.

Please don't encourage the government to ban smoking in cars too. If they're gonna do that then I hope to god they just make it illegal outright. Be happier off them altogether than restricted to sitting in laybys just to have a cig!

De Warrenne

Bang on, but as we all know the judgement of 'driving without' requires a living police officer, not a scamera, am I right in thinking that the camera's are now being adapted to take photo's of people talking on mobile phones?, being triggerred by the microwaves?, if so how is the camera going to distinguish between driver and passenger use, hands free or not use?

MattOz

I'm with a number of previous posts here. IMHO holding a mobile phone to your ear whilst driving is worse than exceeding the speed limit with both hands firmly on the wheel. Road conditions etc taken into account obviously.

Any idiot using a mobile in this way deserves to be given 3 points and £60 fine. Go out and buy a hands free kit FFS.

Matt

De Warrenne

In addition have sk*nned up whilst driving, now that is dangerous.

It was a long time ago, before you start......

Nathan L

Trying to get a careless driving through a court for holding a mobile phone was very difficult, so was the alternative offence of not in proper control.

I have been to two collisions in the past two weeks, that have been as a direct result of people using a mobile phone whilst driving. One of which was a fatal.

People don't give a monkeys about paying a £30 fine if they get caught. Now that points will be attached to the fine it may make some people sit up and take notice.

Nathan..

Diesel

Not looking where you are going is far more dangerous than going a few mph above the limit. No brainer!



Retrieving a number and then calling someone on a mobie takes your eyes well away from the road. When chatting you then cant use indicators & hold the steering wheel at the same time. Silly business – drive or phone but not both.

Jerome

I'm not even sure handsfree should be allowed. Research has shown that talking into a mobile, even handsfree, is dangerous. This is because, unlike talking to a passenger, the person you are talking to cannot see what is going on. For instance, if a driver was coming up to an obstacle that required extra concentration, a passenger would normally stop talking, whereas someone on the other end of the phone won't. This is also what distinguishes talking on the phone to other activities that take a hand off the wheel. I've even heard talking on the phone while driving compared to drink driving.

Phones held to the ear are certainly more dangerous than speeding and definately deserve 3 points. The jury is out on handsfree for the moment.

Markus

No problem at all with points and a fine if you are caught using a phone in the car. Bloody wish they had it over here. I'm cut up daily by some stupid **** on a phone, not looking where they are going. I've also been a passenger whilst someone has been totally engrossed in a conversation on the phone and had to swerve onto the hard shoulder to avoid slamming into the back of a car, all because they were on the phone.

Handsfree, hmm, interesting, it's still a distraction, but at least both hands are on the wheel. Question would be, how much more distracting would it be than listening to music, or more importantly, singing along to music? as both do distract your concentration, however, I doubt it'd be to the same level as having a conversation with someone.

Nathan L

I find talking on the handsfree is no different than talking to someone in the passenger seat! Except you are not tempted to look over to make eye contact.

What are they going to do, ban passengers

DaveD

iTrader: (2)

No brainer - should defiinielly have the same penalty as speeding.

As covered above, speeding in NSL areas generally requires greater attention and awareness of surroundings. Talking while holding a phone seems to prevent users from making proper observations or making any indications.

Changing a cd / tuning the radio etc, can all be accomplished when situations allow, whereas people tend to answer the phone at all costs - mid-roundabout, approaching a zebra crossing etc. I have been nearly side-swiped a number of times as phone users haven't bothered to look in their door mirror or check their blind spot before changing lane

Drunken Bungle Whore

I do a lot of work with TRL - the Transport Research Lab - based in Crowthorne. They do all the NCAP testing, major accident investigations etc etc. They do provide reports to the government, but they don't work solely for them.

Yesterday they were showing me the research into using a mobile phone whilst driving (amongst many other things!) - and they'd compared reaction times to drink driving. They conduct these studies in state of the art car simulators which are very similar to the flight simulators that pilots train on (though obvioulsy with a car rather than a plane!)

The stopping distance for someone using a hands free mobile phone was 4m further than for someone who was at the drink drive limit. (I think it was travelling at 50mph). This distance increased to 14m if the phone was hand held.

I agree that mobile phones aren't the only distraction in a car, but you can't really legistlate against passengers talking to you. Educations, rather than legislation, would be a much better way forward - but how can you educate the entire country? All suggestions would be gladly welcomed I'm sure.

TRL have been investigating transport crashes since 1933 and all their data shows that over recent years the number of accidents hasn't dropped signifcantly in this country - but the reason we're having the crashes changes.

Also - a thought for if you're off on your hols - the numbers of fatalities from road accidents is rising astronomically in places like Asia and Africa. The number of people killed globally in road accidents is roughly equivalent to 5 or 6 Jumbo Jets dropping out of the sky every single day. (And if that was happening, how many of us would get into a plane?)
TRL aren't a bunch of alarmist party poopers - in fact they're occasionally on the look out for guinea pigs to sit in their car simulators and help them with their reseacrh - next time they need bods, I'll let you know - maybe seeing their research facilities first hand could help the sceptics.

Drunken Bungle Whore

Actually - forgot to mention that one of the problems they identified with hands free kits was that they were fitted dangerously. Even some fitted by manufacturers have been known to do rather nasty damage to the passengers kneecaps in an accident.

And that info isn't from crash tests - it's from a number of people who've had their knee caps sliced off.

OllyK

No great surprise, rising economies, more vehicles on the road, many of them old and safe in to cultures that are not used to motor vehicles, poor driver training etc etc, no great surprise really.

No offence, but you are not compairing apples with apples here. I don't know how many people you get on a Jumbo, say 300. So that's 1500 people per day. How many cars are there on the road versus Jumbos in the skies? Now work out in percentage / probability terms. Still scarey but nothing like as bad as your example.

Drunken Bungle Whore

Take you point Olly - but look at all the press coverage and outrage of 7 people killed in the Reading train crash. Calls to make the railways safer, change level crossing etc.

Every single day there are 9 people killed on our roads. Yet every time there is government intervention to try and change it people complain. Useful intelligent suggestions would be a lot better than whinging,

Diesel

I have NO problem believing that - especially after I once sailed through an M25 speed camera without even noticing it cos I was on the phone. That would NEVER have happened otherwise.

D