http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-21554597

Definately yes i SAY,for my job, the phone doesnt get answered when im driving, calls get transfered to voicemail,reason being how do you write customers contact details or check quotations when steering down the road.

Discuss…….

I’d sooner they did something about people putting twatnavz in the middle of their field of vision.

+1 on the twatnav thing. Honestly cannot believe where some folk mount them

Definately yes i SAY,for my job, the phone doesnt get answered when im driving, calls get transfered to voicemail,reason being how do you write customers contact details or check quotations when steering down the road.

Project, If you were serious about your job, you’d have one of these

In my job I have to answer the phone.

Yes from a safety perspective. The same as eating, smoking, changing the radio channel, having noisy kids in the back, eating etc. And for that reason, they will not be! 😉

Hmm, how about we ban crap drivers first – like the one this week that managed to reverse into my car, because he didn’t actually look in his mirror…

Unluckily I had bike on the rack.

Luckily it was the sound of the spd taking a chunk out of his boot that made him stop, along with the Maxle breaking his light.

I’d sooner they did something about people putting twatnavz in the middle of their field of vision.

Charlie Mungus, great idea, but how do you turn the wheel without, sopilling your tea.

In other part of the world near Papua you can text while driving a 4×4 because the roads are wide with hardly any cyclists about nowadays.

The roads here are narrow and twisting so as cyclists you are sharing them with metal cages driven by zombies. Zombies will run over all things in their path so you take your chances if you insist on cycling on their path. Yes, you may argue your rights but then what’s the use when you are already damaged by them?

I think there are some occasions when having a handsfree is actually marginal safety advantage. e.g. when “lost” its actually easier to be ‘talked in’; or if I am running late when its better I quickly call to say I’ll be five mins late than try to race against the clock! Of course there may be a ‘perfect answer’ to these problems that avoids the issue but handsfree is a pragmatic solution.

Then I think it would be hard to enforce in many situations. Am I talking to myself, singing along to the radio, chatting to a passenger or on the phone? Also given that many people don’t get caught using handHELD phones today and it seems to still be “acceptable”.

On the other hand I am surprised at the number of people who manage to get caught on a phone when they were sitting on 9pts and the consequences are ‘very severe’. There is obviously a “Hume Effect” where people don’t expect to get caught.

So I don’t see a benefit – it is already an offence to drive without due care and attention or when not in proper control of the vehicle, which could include using a handsfree…

+ 1 for the **** Nav!

and all these people you currently see driving around at 5.30-6pm on sidelights…… shocking. Its just basic none interest in their driving, i may drive fast sometimes but it gets 100% concentration 100% of the time which makes it a hell of a lot safer than these **** that pootle around looking at their **** nav

I’d love to be a traffic cop

Banning would be futile without applying the law. On Thursday past, I counted over a dozen folk driving and talking into their phones (not hands free).

I totally understand that the police can’t spend their lives pulling over every twit wobbling between the white lines and the gutter but any further ‘bans’ are utterly pointless.

If people drive while talking on a handheld mobile then hands free will be impossible to police. I mean, how could you tell? Someone’s lips moving? They could be having a rant about yet another mouth-breather on Jeremy Vine, or, like me singing (!) along with something on the car stereo. You would have to ban any kind of car audio system, and that ain’t gonna happen.

Charlie Mungus, great idea, but how do you turn the wheel without, sopilling your tea.

Steer qucikly let the centripetal acceleration take care of the rest

Yes, they should be banned – there’s some studies that “showed” the distraction is nearly as great as handheld*

HowTF you’d enforce it I don’t know, but checking phone records for anyone who crashes would be a start

(somebody posted up a story the other day of a PCSO or something who’d caused a crash whilst on her phone, lied and got away with it eventually as the phone “was on her lap on speaker mode” 🙄 )

*no, I haven’t read them fully

Ban Bad Drivers.

Don’t pick at little things, stop people for driving badly. The no phone thing etc. leads people to think they are safe/good just because they have ticked the boxes.

I never use the phone while driving & despair at the amount of people that do, hands free or not. Saw a young woman last week on her phone & it was so blatantly obvious that she had no idea what was going on around her, oblivious to other traffic!
& mapnavs in the middle of the windscreen? WTF? Mine gets stuffed at the bottom right hand side cos I hate distractions!

in addition of you want to ban phones, ban radios, eating, drinking, smoking, mates and kids.

Why ban hands free phone calls? You’d have to ban talking in a car (whether to a phone or other passenger) for it to make any sense.

What about banning smoking? The hands free in my car is activated from the steering wheel which must be sharer than finding a fag, popping it in your mouth and then lighting it?

But then driving is so very boring, so having a few distractions isn’t so bad is it?

why not fit cars with jammers that stop mobiles working when the car is moving? Riding to work every day I see a lot of people talking on their mobiles whilst driving – making it a criminal offence and the current enforcement of it isn’t enough of a detterent.

Riding to work every day I see a lot of people talking on their mobiles whilst driving badly– making it a criminal offence and the current enforcement of it isn’t enough of a detterent.

FIFY

Bad driving is currently an offence, it just seems like people want/need a check list of what makes them a good or bad driver.

When the police and truck drivers stop using radios. Talking to passengers should be nBanned to

<I get cut up three times a week by *satnav drones>

Unenforcable laws aren’t good laws… Only way I can see it being enforced is retroactive punishment- check phone logs after an accident, sort of thing. But I don’t see any way it could be punished as its own offence.

Difference between talking to a passenger is that they’re also aware of what’s going on, so are less likely to distract you at bad times, or to keep on gabbing if they can see you’re distracted. Also, the dynamic of the conversation’s usually different.

On Thursday I saw a woman reading a sheaf of a4 papers whilst driving and a bloke with an ipad set up on his windscreen as a satnav.

I was tempted to sideswipe them just so I could say “now look what you’ve done!”.

It’s not mobile phones per se, it’s bad driving in general.

I’d saturate the place with traffic police and ANPR cameras. Any transgression of any sort, pulled over and fined. If the car is unroadworthy at that point – a light out, bald tyres – another fine for that. If an uninsured/untaxed car is caught on ANPR at a garage, the fuel pump shuts down.

Pay off the country’s debt in about 25 minutes that. Also, I’d make a great dictator. 🙂

passenger …less likely to distract you at bad times,

Really? You have lovely passengers. 🙂

It’s different.

Talking to someone in the car is different from talking on the phone/handsfree. I don’t know why or how, but it is.

I’m with crazy-legs though. As long as he makes me his minister of cheese.

Technically* it is illegal to attach anything to the windscreen or mirror that will interfere with your field of vision.

* as told to me by a traffic cop who was tidying up an accident caused by one of those MagicTree-style air fresheners blocking the driver’s view. It was bloody huge!! Guessing it excludes the tax disc mind 😉

Yes, IMO handsfree should absolutely be banned. There are plenty of studies that show it’s no less distracting than using a non-hands free phone.

“I think there are some occasions when having a handsfree is actually marginal safety advantage… Of course there may be a ‘perfect answer’ to these problems that avoids the issue but handsfree is a pragmatic solution. “

Of course there’s a bloody “perfect answer”! Pull over, stop the car, make the call. How hard is it to simply do that?

“Why ban hands free phone calls? You’d have to ban talking in a car (whether to a phone or other passenger) for it to make any sense.“

No, it’s been shown that a conversation with someone who’s physically with you doesn’t place any significant demand on the part of your brain that deals with spatial issues. Whereas speaking to a disembodied voice does.

“Bad driving is currently an offence, it just seems like people want/need a check list of what makes them a good or bad driver. “

The great thing is that bad drivers do bad things like talking on the phone. Again, there was a significant stufy last year that demonstrated that pulling people for phone use didn’t have a significant effect on accident rates because the same people were being bad drivers all the time. Sadly it was reported rather short-sightedly as being an indicator of phone use being a red herring, when it’s quite the reverse: phone use is a great indicator of bad drivers, and what it means is that giving people a £60 fine will make zero difference. What you need to do is say “ah, here we have someone who needs to have a more careful approach to driving” and (re)educate them accordingly. What we treat is the symptom, not the cause. And even then, £60 doesn’t exactly treat it.

+1 for what crazy-legs says. There are ANPR cameras all over the place, and since they’re at every petrol station in the country you can “ground” people easily.

Enforcement of handsfree use in cars would be tricky, for sure, but not beyond the wit of man – or at least technology.

Having read the link, I can’t help but think that we’re focussing on the wrong part of the accident.

Better cycle lanes, better roads (the pot holes in cycle lanes round here are lethal currently), better segregation of cyclists from HGVs in urban areas and a fundamental rethink of traffic priorities.

The recent Chris Boardman video for British cycling sums up the situation – countless cycle lanes just disappear when conditions get more hazardous for cyclists and also tend to introduce hazards rather than redress them. There is a cycle lane designed to stop me having to ride through a tunnel on my way to work. I have to cross six lanes of traffic travelling at 40mph to get to it and to rejoin from it. Given that I can pull 22mph through the tunnel, I’m better off forgetting the cycle lane.

Ideally yes.
Wait til you get home like we used to do.
with the sod all police we have no point.

We just need to enforce current laws/made sentencing more severe. The sentence handed down to the guy who hit Mary Bowers is woefully inadequate, especially if, as per what the doctors expect, she dies… surely it then becomes manslaughter?

It seems these days that right of way is irrelevant in most peoples’ minds. Maybe just a London thing because traffic is so heavy, but no-one waits behind parked cars or buses, just pull out and keep going towards the oncoming traffic, same with 30mph limits, and now the de rigeur way of of dealing with traffic on the main road when coming in from a side road seems to be stick your nose into it and bully your way in! Has no-one heard of waiting until there’s a gap?!

There’s no cop cars around anymore and I think people are realising they can get away with pretty any crap driving they feel like… bit like when the teacher was out of the room…

If we are going to ban handsfree I’d like to add an additional amendment banning drivers also being responsible for children under say the age of 5 at the same time – i.e. if you are going to transport a baby or toddler in a car there needs to be another responsible person in the car too. Or will mumsnet put a fatwa on me?

[img]http://imgs.inkfrog.com/pix/magicsammagicsam/CHILDREN-ON-BOARD.jpg[/img]
Universal sign translating to “I’m not paying attention as the Kids are more important” or “Please don’t drive into me”

We have laws that cover bad/distracted driving they are not enforced. Driver training needs improved, re-education rather than punishments, and the current laws enforced.

DrRSwank wins IMO, do you outlaw the driver talking to passengers as well? same thing really. The blue light brigade seem to think it’s possible to do running commentary whilst driving at speed in built up areas, they’re just like us really, not superhuman or anything. When my sister joined up and did some extra driving lessons, she didn’t noticeably change into a super driver.

Pointless. It cant be policed effectively.

I don’t use phones in the car as a rule (and always hands free when I do). Where they have real value is for two things imo.
1 – you can make an emergency call where it is not possible to stop (i know technically this is a vali defence for a handheld call but that its safer to be HF)
2 – situations like y you can call a loved one when stranded on a closed motorway 100 miles from.home so they dont spend hours going spare

Personally I believe there are worse driving ills that merit focus than this most of which.there is legislation to enforce but a lack of resource. I’m pretty sure phone use hf or not is a factor considered in post accident prosecutions anyway – if not it ought to be.

i used to work for a small bus company, operating a park and ride.
short route, about 16 minutes driving per round trip, really easy in a quietish town which i know well.
the company used to encourage us to wear a handsfree kit, which they supplied, so that they could contact us if necessary.
when my wife phoned me, (regularly) she could tell me where i was from the other end of the phone because if i got to a junction/roundabout i would go quiet as i dealt with it.
now, if i, as a professional driver, doing the same route 16 times a day, 6 days a week, found it difficult to manage a basic conversation on fairly quiet roads, what chance has a regular driver, who probably only doing a route twice a day max, of doing either task justice?
my vote would be for a signal jammer which operates while the engine is running.

There is a big ol difference between chatting to someone on a handsfree and someone in the passenger seat. The person in the passenger seat also has an idea what’s going on through the windscreen and if anything, can assist the driver. The person on the end of a phone conversation thinks the driver has his or her undivided attention.

I’ve been in cars/vans when the driver has answered the phone in busy traffic. I shit myself until he finishes. I’m never quite as worried being a passenger just shooting the breeze with the driver.