What can we do about drivers on phones….

2nd conviction cut their thumbs off with a bandsaw

1st conviction receive a fine and someone elses thumbs

Maybe a  STW collective ‘campaign’ of written contact to PCCs and Chief Constables etc? A bit like Cycling UK do where they have a template for you to use. It’s a start. (thinking emoji)

whether it would actually be safer to allow the use of phones as long as they were in a dash mounted cradle.

We already do?

Make it 7 points so if you are caught twice in 5 years it’s an automatic 1 year ban

That’s not how it works. 12 points is a minimum six month ban. You’d only get a year ban if a previous ban was taken into account.

No hardship please allowed.tough

Again, that’s not how it works. Exceptional Hardship is only applied in, well, exceptional cases and would be offset by considerably higher fines. Hardship in and of itself is explicitly barred from affecting a court decision.  Successfully securing an Exceptional Hardship plea is really difficult despite what the gutter press would have us believe.

My punishment would be an instant 12 month ban, no excuses, no caveats.

Still not how it works.

Company I work for puts cameras in lorry cabs, just need to have them by default in cars – sell it as an insurance reducer!

the black box saw that his phone was unlocked while driving

Colour me sceptical.

Couple of lines of code to ensure that the car would stop running if you don’t have your phone on the reader.

“I don’t have a phone.”

no car brand will add something like this

I think it’s a legal requirement now for new cars to have the ability to talk natively to a black box?

They should have an inbuilt ‘I am not working as you a driving’ safety mechanism.

How’s that going to work for the passengers?

For a lot of the drivers skills on display out there, DoucheMusks fully autonomous uber taxi things can’t come quickly enough.

We don’t have driverless trains and they’re on rails. Driverless cars is up there with Father Christmas and the tooth fairy.

On the subject of truck drivers

I saw one a while back with a paperback book on the go.

What about, if you provide evidence of another person using a phone while driving… I imagine you’d see a steep drop off in illegal phone use

How? By filming them on your phone as you drive past?

There is no money to fund the police to actually police it.

Make the fine enough to cover the costs and problem solved.

Honestly I would be pleased if it was an active revenue raiser. UK drivers pay £1.2 billion a year* on parking fines to private companies. Given current rates of phone use, and the potential for harm, I would want total fines for phone use to be 3 or 4 times that at least.

The annual police budget is £17 billion*. So it pays for a big chunk of that bill.

*Numbers plucked from Google without fact-checking

IMHO any crime with a chosen intent should have at least two zeros added to the current fine, complete and final loss of the vehicle and a 5 year ban.

How’s that going to work for someone who has no money? £5/fortnight until you’re dead?

Sentencing isn’t the issue. Enforcement is the issue.

Stuff any hardship plea.

Still not how it works.

2nd conviction would bring a serious charge with a large fine and something like 8 points

3rd conviction even larger fine, 3 year ban, and even confiscation of the vehicle if they are the owner(or increase fine/ban if they aren’t

4th conviction. 1 month prison sentence plus fine and 2 year ban.

Almost how it works already. We’re getting there, woo!

Mobile phone use when driving is a pain.  It used to be the case that you could see someone ahead and think “they’re pissed.”  Nowadays, it’s “they’re either drunk or on the phone.”  There is no need for it and no excuse, even if you’re driving something from the 1970s you can still sucker a phone cradle to the windscreen to use as a satnav.  But knee-jerk reactions squealing about punitive measures two steps away from “hanging’s too good for them” is not helpful.  What’s needed isn’t the punishment, it’s the fear of being caught.  Our full-on robot chubbie for lucrative speed cameras has had a knock-on effect on actual police just being out and about.

Driving without a seatbelt today would be unthinkable.  Lighting a fag in the cinema would be unthinkable.  Having a gallon of lager and driving home would (largely) be unthinkable.  These aren’t just legal pressures, they’re social pressures.  We need to get to the same point with phones – someone who is driving picks up their phone, the passenger goes “put that down, you nob.”

Make it 7 points so if you are caught twice in 5 years it’s an automatic 1 year ban .

6 points (as it currently is) already achieves this – although its 2x in 3yrs = 6 months ban because that’s the totting up rules.

No hardship please allowed.tough .

Its not hardship its EXCEPTIONAL hardship which the law allows to be considered as part of totting up proceedings.  Contrary to the impression you will get in places like this, it is not at all easy to argue (if it was it wouldn’t be exceptional).  The Crown could probably do with appealing some of the more questionable cases though to keep the standard high.

Make it a minimum of £700 fine , double for second offence in 5 years.

We don’t have minimum fines in this country.  The maximum fine for using a mobile phone is £2500.  The fixed penalty is £200, if you are caught twice in 3 yrs you will need to go to court anyway and so will likely get a bigger fine (and in E&W +prosecution costs etc).

Allow a kick back of 10% of the fine to anyone leading to a successful conviction of phone use. They did it with drink driving back in the 90s.

Did they?  I’m not sure we want people arguing in court that “CycleCameraGuy” is only reporting them for the money or to encourage “SkintCameraGuy” to distort/exagerate evidence to lead to more convictions.

Ask insurance companies to double the insurance of people who refuse to fit a tamper proof camera that records the driver while the engine is running. Remove the ” no I wasn’t” to prove you weren’t by showing me the video. The tech is so cheap now. Insurance void if you point the camera elsewhere.

Insurance protects “innocent” third parties – voiding it seems like a bad idea.   Even if it was just the comprehensive bit of the policy – nobody believes they are going to have an accident so at that moment in time would not matter.

Small fine/points is ok on a first offender, as long as nobody is harmed.

So if you admit it and have a clean license (or 3 points max) you will likely be offered £200 + 6pts

2nd conviction would bring a serious charge with a large fine and something like 8 points

A second offence in 3yrs will go to court, you will tot up and be banned for 6 months.  The court will almost always fine you significantly more than £200.

3rd conviction even larger fine, 3 year ban, and even confiscation of the vehicle if they are the owner(or increase fine/ban if they aren’t

A 3rd conviction IS likely to result in a ban.  (If the first offence was dealt with by fixed penalty it will NOT be recorded as a conviction so if the points are off you license the court will not know about it unless you went to court – the “deal” with fixed penalties is if you pay quickly the state won’t record a conviction and it is mostly forgotten after 4 yrs).

4th conviction. 1 month prison sentence plus fine and 2 year ban.

Sending people to prison for 1 month – almost regardless of what its for is generally regarded by everyone “in the system” as a really bad use of resources.   It won’t have escaped your notice that prisons are bursting at the seems.  People who go to prison often become unemployable – so not only do you and I need to pay for them to be housed for a month but the state ends up subsidising them potentially for the rest of their lives.

One issue is that people “with points” on their license believe it is “normal” when in fact the majority of drivers have clean licenses.  Perhaps if there was a bit more social stigma around points it would make job applications, car rental etc a little bit more awkward.

The problem, as with most traffic offences, is not the penalty regime – its that the chances of detection are low and if you did it once last week and got away with it then twice this week seems ok, an four times next week and still no action so its just normal.  You need cops and they need to be motivated to catch people.  And stop sending people on driver improvement courses for stuff that required an intentional action.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5190126-nob-on-a-bike

A timely Mumsnet thread. To my very pleasant suprise, most commenters there (aside from the original poster) agree with us!

I note lots of people on this thread seem to have opinions/ideas on how various technologies could help address this problem, one primarily created by technology and human behaviours,

I’d respectfully suggest that while there might be a ‘tech‘ angle to consider, the key bit is still the behaviour aspect. add all the black boxes and sensors you like (and with them more potential points of failure?) but fundamentally its the conduct of the autonomous meat sack in the driver’s seat that needs adjustment.

Almost every time I venture outside the behaviour aspect on display seems to be a lost cause, you just have to remain vigilant in the douche heavy environment.

It took years and years of government advertising to change attitudes and behaviour towards drink drinking and seat bet use. A long term advertising campaign could help educate and ‘shame’ the public in to adopting new behaviours.

Car manufactures (Volvo) are starting to have internal facing cameras that detect it. It’ll take time for this to come into fruition and across the board, but it’ll happen. Nothing will work until then. And another decade of ‘phone use at the wheel’ – while not great – is so insignificant on a population-level timescale that it really doesn’t matter. It matters to us because we’re living through it, but in x number of years it won’t be a thing any more (not least because cars will – very likely – be operating quite autonomously).

Change takes a while. We always want everything to happen immediately – the world just doesn’t work like that. Legislation and planning is forward-looking. Eg all this green energy etc stuff and national infrastructure (HS2, ETC etc) we’re doing now isn’t for us, it’s for future generations.

Wife’s nephew got a warning phone call off his insurers because his mate had been using his phone to choose some music in the car, and the black box saw that his phone was unlocked while driving – the tech does exist.

I don’t get why black boxes aren’t more widespread.

My daughter’s mate has this.  She can’t sat-nav on her phone while driving as the black box app won’t allow it.

I can see teens getting 2 phones, an el-cheapo with the black-box app and their main phone for satnav/music/crossy-road

some new cars can detect if you arent paying attention to the road. thats a catch all for tiredness, phone use, playing with the stereo, tying to spank the kid behind you…

pretty much every car in the last 5+ years (so probably approaching half the cars driven regularly) has carplay/android auto. if people actually used the technology presented to them, maps, texts (read out for you) etc can be done hands free via your car. phone never needs to leave my pocket so no faffing with cradles that detect the phone and so on.

I’d love to see mandatory dashcams including a view of the driver. any accident, footage reviewed, and if you are on your phone, insurance refuses to pay out (3rd party remains, obviously). a few high profile tabloid sob stories about being out of pocket five figures might scare the rest of the population into complying.

Change takes a while. We always want everything to happen immediately – the world just doesn’t work like that. Legislation and planning is forward-looking. Eg all this green energy etc stuff and national infrastructure (HS2, ETC etc) we’re doing now isn’t for us, it’s for future generations.

Thing is, the laws on mobile use while driving were first passed in 2003, that’s 21 years ago. So in the space of about one generation the square root of sweet FA has been achieved despite people having the foresight in the early 2000’s to try and legislate against the very situation we find ourselves living with today. how many future generations should we expect to pass before this relatively simple issue is finally gripped?

Patience, for all it’s virtues, can be a bit overrated at times.

Even if it was technologically possible, how would it affect passengers?

It wouldn’t be difficult to build solutions. We already have detection by cameras from outside a car so think how much easier it would if we had cameras in the car itself. Whole can of worms on privacy but it’s not a technology implementation issue.

How? By filming them on your phone as you drive past?

No obviously…

If you Think long and hard about it, I’m sure you could think of some examples where you don’t need to be driving a car yourself to be able to film a driver on their phone….

the black box saw that his phone was unlocked while driving

Colour me sceptical

It’s true this happens…

My OH has fannied around with car insurance for her daughter, so that SHE has the black box in her name (which is linked to my OHs phone)

Her daughter was driving the car, my OH was on HER phone, and the insurance company wrote saying if this happens again (phone use whilst driving) they’ll cancel the policy..

DrP

Thing is, the laws on mobile use while driving were first passed in 2003, that’s 21 years ago. So in the space of about one generation the square root of sweet FA has been achieved despite people having the foresight in the early 2000’s to try and legislate against the very situation we find ourselves living with today. how many future generations should we expect to pass before this relatively simple issue is finally gripped?

With the incoming tech, the car will safely pull itself over and/or log the incident for insurance purposes. It is coming. Expect it to be prevalent in 10-15 years (which is acceptable/reasonable)

If so, I hope the next gen of electric cars can divert some electrons via a prong built into the seat to alert the driver more…

If you Think long and hard about it, I’m sure you could think of some examples where you don’t need to be driving a car yourself to be able to film a driver on their phone….

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

Point is, if you’re monetising joe public to collect evidence of other folk using phones, you’ll be encouraging people at least as much as dissuading them.  It’s not a solution, it’s just displacing the problem.

It’s true this happens…

My OH has fannied around with car insurance for her daughter, so that SHE has the black box in her name (which is linked to my OHs phone)

Her daughter was driving the car, my OH was on HER phone, and the insurance company wrote saying if this happens again (phone use whilst driving) they’ll cancel the policy..

Ah, insurance fraud. (-:

I didn’t realise there was an app these days, mia culpa.  When one of my apprentices passed his test it was an actual physical box installed in the car.