Although millions of people break this particular law on a daily basis, it makes sense to me to argue that it should be kept. When I was with someone who broke it, I was terrified.
I was travelling from Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport in a Shuffle Minibus. We stopped at various points in the city to pick up other guests from hotels, and when the rear of the bus was full, the final two travellers slid in beside the driver.
After several visits to France I have been left with an impression that, on the whole, drivers in France are faster, and less risk averse than in the UK. This was recently confirmed to me when I learned that the French have had a notoriously bad accident record (around twice the number of fatal accidents per head of population in 2001 when compared with the UK or Japan). The driver of the minibus could be described as having a ‘typically French’ attitude to the road.
The speedy swaying between lanes, in order to save a second, on a fast and busy road was bad enough. Doing the swaying and chatting up the two attractive women sitting next to him and passing them paper and pen so that they could write down their phone numbers for him was worse. Doing all of the above AND THEN holding a mobile phone to his ear and carrying on a long conversation was literally terrifying. When the inevitable happened and we were nearly involved in a collision, the swaying, the chatting up, the pen passing, the mobile phone conversation stopped, just for a few seconds so that he could swear and gesticulate at the other driver, before continuing as normal. It felt safer to be on the plane thousands of feet in the air than on terra firma in that particular minibus.
It makes sense to me to ban manual usage of mobile phones while driving. However, at least two statistics are highlighting problems with this particular ban.
The first concerns the fact that the law is largely being ignored. Despite increased penalties (a fixed-penalty fine of £60 and three penalty points on their licence) very few of the many offenders are ever prosecuted. A study by the Liberal Democrats showed that only 50 fixed-penalty notices were handed out every day despite 2.6% of people being seen using handheld phones while driving. Only one in 6,000 motorists who use their mobile phone while driving in London are caught and fined. A lot of drivers have become very adept at throwing their phone on the car floor everytime they see a police vehicle. Culturally it is still seen as a ’silly crime’ invented by the ‘nanny state’.
The second concern comes from a study from the UK Transport Research Laboratory reported by the BBC showing that even the use of legal hands-free kits have no safety benefits. Having a phone conversation while driving, even with a legal hands-free kit, could be more dangerous than drink-driving. According to the research, a driver on the phone is more distracted than one who has drunk as much as the legal alcohol limit. This is a serious challenge to the many of us who thought we were safe using hands-free.
It is likely that companies will start banning the use of mobile phones completely while driving. One of the UK’s biggest transport companies, FirstGroup, has announced that none of its employees will be allowed to use hands-free mobiles. FirstGroup operates more than one in five local bus services across the UK, and trains including First Great Western. The firm’s bus and train drivers are already banned from using them and that will be extended to any staff on company business.
The risk of a crash is four times higher when the driver was on the phone. Even though drivers regularly chat to passengers, the problem seems to be that when talking on the phone, the other person’s body is not in the car. A passenger is like to stop talking if they see a difficult traffic situation and give off signals from their body or tone about any impending threat. A person at the other end of the phone just chats on regardless.
I was left contemplating two things. First, it seems to me highly unlikely that extending the ban to the use of presently legal hands-free kits (ironically, as is already the case in France) could ever be successfully enforced. Most people will continue not to see the threat as serious, and will continue to give their Pavlovian response to the ringing machine. And given the technological advances where phones can be answered via car radios or satellite navigation systems, the tell-tale ear-pieces are likely to soon disappear, making usage detection very difficult.
Secondly, what about CD and MP3 players and Radios? I can’t imagine a significant car journey without trying to increase my very limited Italian vocabulary using a downloaded podcast, without revisiting my youth via my Beetles CDs, or without trying to find something to blog about by listening to Radio 4. Have any studies been done on the effects of other distracting and absorbing sounds in the car on driving safety? I would love to know. Surely any attempts to ban music or radio would be doomed to failure, but on the face of it, it seems likely that they too may be dangerous.
The ban on the use of mobiles in cars illustrates an important point, I think: it doesn’t matter by how much you increase penalties if people don’t expect to get caught. The fact that I see large numbers of drivers using phones while driving (sometimes fast and in dangerous situations) shows that there is a widespread belief that mobile users won’t get caught. This in turn implies that they don’t often get caught.
The only way to put a significant dent in this dangerous habit is to make sure that drivers know that their chances of getting caught if they use a mobile are very good. That is unlikely to happen in the near future.
It will probably take a lot more mobile-induced fatal accidents to cause the sort of public outcry that causes governments to sit up and take notice.
I do not drive a car but I ride a motorcycle and have been doing for nearly ten years. I have been involved in three accidents, through no fault of my own, down to a lack of awareness. I’m in control of an incredibly powerful machine and because I’m aware of my vulnerability, I’m incredibly careful to the point where I don’t even listen to music, just so that my full attention is focused on the road. I have seen, on many occasion, people driving and chatting away on their mobile phones. I have ridden around Europe several times. Cities and towns in France and Italy, absolutely terrify me. I don’t think it’s necessarily that people don’t feel that they’ll get caught, they just don’t see it as a risk.