Stiffer penalties from tomorrow for using a phone while driving

[MD]

tbh, the police has become a joke. Pulling people over for doing 75 whilst someone passes you on a phone doing 70 and the guy doing 75 gets done instead due to 'targets'

I drove round leicester on Saturday, at the M69/M1 roundabout there were three police cars and two motorbikes.

All looking for road tax.

Whats the point, they keep advertising they will find you based on the computer, why waste man hours looking for something a computer already does.

Don't get me wrong though, I hate people that drive on the phone, I never do it, I'd rather cut them off than speak to them in that situation......especially the boss

[GrahamGarside]

It's true that while whats seems like almost all of our road police have been replaced by flashing yellow boxes most infractions go unpunished. The general lack of care and consideration you see on the road day to day is frightening, and mobile phone usage is just one issue.

Unless speed cameras also come with phone signal detectors to grab a pick of you using the phone then most people will get away with it.

[Butuz]

I think the more they come down on mobile phone users the better.

Butuz

[Tom Scott]

I drove round leicester on Saturday, at the M69/M1 roundabout there were three police cars and two motorbikes.

Trip to Shytners by any chance?

The police in Leicester are terrible anyway mate (if anyone remembers the documentry last year about them). I've had a derelict range rover outside my house for 4 months and they will not move it even though its out of tax - I've reported it got an incident number but it still remains there gathering bird doo. Wonder how much range rover spares go for on ebay?

Say you get caught scratching your ear by a speed camera doing 34 in 30, and one of your headlights has just gone. You're going to get banned!

[[GSV]Trig]

Technically, its anything that distracts you from driving.

Does that mean all the big billboards on the sides of the roads are going to be banned then? Some nice women on some of them that are pretty distracting..

How about road signs tho, if your reading a road sign your not concentrating on the road are you....

[MD]

no I wasn't I was coming bacxk from the chinese supermarket

tbh, think of it this way, road tolls come in you get charged for using the road, your charged for using the road too quickly and you get charged if you move your hand off the steering wheel.

I think i'll emigrate.

[Tom Scott]

Remember what car you drive now Matt, you don't need to acknowledge the law, or other road users and most importantly definetly not use indicators.
I've got it down to a fine art now after a year

[GrahamGarside]

I think those radio 'safety' adverts should be banned as well.

There are two that I've heard, one telling you about the dangers of driving tired, that uses a really sombre tone that when you are actually quite tired makes you worse.

And another going on about trying to concentrate on two things at once with more than one thing being said at the same time which is distracting because it makes you try to listen to each piece of dialogue.

[Nick]

I'm in two minds on this one.

Half of me thinks this is just another stealth tax, aimed at people who spend a lot of time in thier cars and therefore actually have a need of staying in contact...

The other half of me thinks that this is a sensible law which will reduce car accidents.

But then I realise that although using a mobile phone undoubtedly inscrease the chances of having an accident, you could then apply that to anything that takes your mind off driving... like listening to music, talking to the person next to you, listening to your sat nav and checking the little moving map display... oh hang on...

You see, the mobile phone does THREE things that you do already... so surely we should ban those other things as well.

What three things are they? Driving with one hand. Talking. Listening.

I 100% agree that you can't drive with one hand unless you have an automatic and one of those trucker style knobs on your wheel, so perhaps we should have a dispensation for drivers of automatics with knobs on their wheels as they can still control their cars as normal.

This means picking your nose is, technically, illegal, not that I'll be at all sorry to see the sight of a burly trucker rooting with his index finger up to the second knuckle in his nasal cavity as he mines the green gold.

But it does mean you can't drink a beverage whilst driving, instantly rendering that cup holder you bought in the options list useless... and also meaning that hundreds of BP Wild Bean Cafes and thousands of similar outlets will now have to close as they'll otherwise be illegally supplying drivers with tempting fresh ground lattes to sup whilst motoring along... which is clearly illegal.

Oh, and Ginsters and their tempting range of meat filled pastries are shafted too.

But then we have the whole talking/listening thing.

If you listen to the adverts on the radio, they tell you that using a mobile is distracting and you can;t do to things at once, ie drive and listen.

I have a bit of a problem with this as the advert tells you to either drive or listen... NOT both... but you're in the car already, listeing to the advert! So surely the very people who wnat to keep you safe are putting you in danger!

So the listening thing is a dangerous too... the advert which I heard and then immediately felt dangerous about, told me this.

So we have to ban listening too.

Of course, this will make any car journey with a chatty passenger impossible and pretty much instantly illegal. There is an exception to this and that is for any man driving his mother-in-law anywhere as the instant the doors shut his ears filter her out anyway.

And if you think I'm being daft, I'm not. How many times, when you're trying to find somewhere in the car and you're near where you're supposed to be, have you reached down and turned down the radio so you can concentrate on finding your destination?

We all do it.

It's a fact that men cannot use the communication center of the brain at the same time as concentrate on the multiplex of operations needed to drive a car to a hard to find destination at ever greater speeds and in even more of a temper until you finally give in and ask for directions.

Women, on the other hand, are much better communicators, so they can happily gossip away for hours whilst doing twenty other things so perhaps they should be exempt from this law completely too.

A woman in an automatic with a knob on her wheel is doubly safe, surely?

And I gaurantee you the accident rate won't increase one iota... well, not from the female drivers point of view anyway... unless it's reversing... which they never have a hope of doing even if they weren't on the phone.

Of course, there's some stuff that they could do to actually make an immeadiate improvement in road safety.

First, anyone over 65 has to re-take their test on a yearly basis.

Anyone with a blue rinse has to have a test every week.

Anyone driving a 1.1 Fiesta or Ka has to do the same. (This covers the kids who can't afford to insure anything else but still think they're Michael Schumacher)

Oh, and anyone who drives any make of white van, all BMW drivers and anyone who reps for any company (which should cover all Vectra and Mondeo drivers)... rather than trying to catch them, just issue them with three points now... they're all guilty.

And, once you've taxed... sorry, fined, all of the above, you'll have your cash and won't need to arse about trying to catch me who has a handsfree kit and uses voice tagging and obeys the law as far as I can...

And that means you can stop hiding bloody speed cameras 10 yards into the thirty limit just after the bend of a national speed limit zone... Do it one more time and I'll have to call my MP... except, of course, I can't.

[Blademrk]

and one of those trucker style knobs on your wheel,

I think they may be illegal too.

[Tom Scott]

you'll have your cash and won't need to arse about trying to catch me who has a handsfree kit and uses voice tagging and obeys the law as far as I can...

Do you have to press a button on the headset/car kit to activate the voice tagging? Just to be pedantic, thats technically a distraction.

I'm gonig to love the amount of CPS time being wasted persuing these handsfree offenders through the legal system, and I wonder how many times the defence "I was scratching my ear/head to relieve an itch that was irritating me and thereforedestracting me from driving in a safe manner" will be used. It'll be fairly impossible to prove that isn't the case unless you had access to the users phone records etc, which I doubt they'd be able to get a warrant to get.

[GrahamGarside]

It's rattles me when you tell they've purposely changed a road layout as a speed trap. Near me they changed the lane system near a set of lights. Now this road is a 30 road but it's a big main road that everyone did 40+ down. They tore up the tarmac at a set of lights and when they put the new surface down they changed it to two ahead lanes at the lights which merges into one about 15m on. Then ~30m further on round a bend they put a camera up. Now if this isn't an attempt to get people to burn off in the second ahead lane only to be caught by a camera round a bend they can't see I don't know what is

[pauldarkside]

Does that mean all the big billboards on the sides of the roads are going to be banned then?

Yeah the ones advertising mobile phones

[Tom Scott]

It's rattles me when you tell they've purposely changed a road layout as a speed trap. Near me they changed the lane system near a set of lights. Now this road is a 30 road but it's a big main road that everyone did 40+ down. They tore up the tarmac at a set of lights and when they put the new surface down they changed it to two ahead lanes at the lights which merges into one about 15m on. Then ~30m further on round a bend they put a camera up. Now if this isn't an attempt to get people to burn off in the second ahead lane only to be caught by a camera round a bend they can't see I don't know what is

Maybe they put the camera there after there was several deaths due to dangerous driving because they changed the road layout?

[Bob Crabtree]

I'm gonig to love the amount of CPS time being wasted persuing these handsfree offenders through the legal system, and I wonder how many times the defence "I was scratching my ear/head to relieve an itch that was irritating me and thereforedestracting me from driving in a safe manner" will be used. It'll be fairly impossible to prove that isn't the case unless you had access to the users phone records etc, which I doubt they'd be able to get a warrant to get.

Well, them that are innocent will find a way of getting access to their own phone records, so that is bound to mean, surely, that once a few cases have gone through the courts, the prosecution will be getting access even in cases where the motorist doesn't choose to make them available?

That said, like others, I think that the idea of confiscating phones would be a significant additional deterrent - assuming that's a permanent thing, not temporary.

I also agree that the idea of confiscating phones would be a significant additional deterrent - assuming that's a permanent thing, not temporary.

Actually, that's an all-round good idea - it might also mean there are lots of chances to buy exotic phones from the government that you couldn't otherwise afford and give a general boost to the mobile phone makers.

But, as others have pointed out, the new change is likely to make little difference until the law starts getting enforced.

And, there are other motoring offences I'd like to see enforce, on top of the serious ones.

Something I particularly hate is people stopping in box junctions and blocking the way for folk wanting to drive across the junction.

[GrahamGarside]

There is an accident hot spot a few miles further down the road but not where they put the camera and it's the way it's setup to tempt people to speed off up to a camera they can't yet see. I've already seen a guy in a BMW caught by it and slam on his breaks. If my explanation didn't make it clear this is what they did. And the camera went up at the same time as the road works