You keep implying that drivers distracting themselves with their phone whilst stopped in traffic are harmless, whereas it's very dangerous - that's precisely why the law was drafted to specifically make even just holding a phone whilst in control of a motor vehicle to be illegal.
Drivers are not able to quickly switch contexts between staring at a phone and looking around their vehicle and this "whatsapp-gap" is painfully obvious when cycling past slow/stopped traffic. It does lead to collisions with other road users - typically pedestrians and cyclists as drivers tend to only bother looking for other car-shaped vehicles and even more so when they're in the 30 second re-adjustment of their attention.
There is no "safe" use of a phone when driving - even using it in a cradle/hands-free which is legal in the UK, leads to a higher level of distraction and there would be a strong argument for making that illegal too, but we should focus more on enforcement of the existing traffic laws.
There's people like Mikey trying to make the world a bit better, and then there's people like you who make apologies for dangerous and illegal drivers. Maybe you should re-examine your attitude.
> You keep implying that drivers distracting themselves with their phone whilst stopped in traffic are harmless, whereas it's very dangerous - that's precisely why the law was drafted to specifically make even just holding a phone whilst in control of a motor vehicle to be illegal.
It's not dangerous at all. Checking a text message at a red light for significantly less duration than the red light is by definition harmless.
> There's people like Mikey trying to make the world a bit better, and then there's people like you who make apologies for dangerous and illegal drivers. Maybe you should re-examine your attitude.
I have no need. Mikey is in it for the ego and the guise of 'making the world a bit better'. Anyone who can't see that needs to take a step back and reexamine their assumptions.
Checking a text message at a red light affects drivers' ability to focus and recognise what's going on around then. You might as well say that drinking a shot of whisky at a red light for significantly less duration than the red light is harmless.
Mikey is absolutely not an egotist - you're just pushing some nasty little agenda of your own by trying to cast doubt on his reasons. His father was killed by a drunk driver and he now attempts to work with the police to catch drivers in illegal behaviour before someone else is hurt and killed.
If you do much road cycling in the UK, it becomes painfully obvious that there's a significant proportion of drivers that do not know how to drive safely or how to pay sufficient attention to what they are doing. I use front and back cameras in an attempt to similarly record bad driving and submit it to the police - it's a small attempt to make the roads safer. I certainly don't put as much time and effort in as Mikey, but I know exactly where he is coming from and it's just ridiculous when people think he does it for the recognition.
> Checking a text message at a red light affects drivers' ability to focus and recognise what's going on around then.
This is nonsense. Cite some studies to support your point if you like, but I doubt you will find any. Most people can check a message responsibly.
The countries that don't make doing so illegal don't tend to have worse accident rates. There's really nothing to support your belief.
> Mikey is absolutely not an egotist
He absolutely is. It's why he forces himself into situations. Not to mention he benfits financially from doing so.
> he now attempts to work with the police
He doesn't work 'with' the police, he forwards footage, that's it.
> to catch drivers in illegal behaviour before someone else is hurt and killed.
He catches some dangerous behavior, he also catches harmless behavior that is common and costs people money. I wish him all the worst.
> I use front and back cameras in an attempt to similarly record bad driving and submit it to the police - it's a small attempt to make the roads safer.
Are you ever worried about someone jacking the cameras if you have an accident?
The problem with trying to justify phone use when driving is the "normalisation" effect. People may start off being ultra careful with phone use, but unless there's some process to warn them, they end up using their phone more and more. One advantage of Mikey's shopping in of phone users is that it provides at least some negative adjustment of drivers' phone use.
I won't address your remarks about Mikey as they are largely matters of opinion, though I seriously doubt that he makes anything more than pocket change from his work and likely that is swallowed up by the costs incurred with buying bike cams.
As far as "working" with the police, that's very much the line that the police bring out for encouraging the public to submit video evidence of traffic offences.
"Harmless behaviour that is common" - as discussed, the behaviour is not harmless which is precisely why the phone use law was introduced and why the police are interested in prosecuting for it. Luckily, it's only a fraction of drivers that do injure others due to phone use, but the same can be said for speeding etc. The idea is to try to prevent careless/dangerous driving that will predictably lead to a greater chance of a collision (NB not an accident as accidents are unavoidable and unpredictable).
> Are you ever worried about someone jacking the cameras if you have an accident?
Again, "accident" is better replaced with "collision" as "accident" implies that it's uncontrollable and "just one of those things", whereas the vast majority of collisions are due to driver behaviour such as lack of attention, speeding etc. (I tend to think of "accident" as something like a tree falling onto your vehicle). I've thought about what would happen if a driver did try to grab my cameras, but it would seem to be a very low probability event - I frequent https://road.cc and there's often rider submitted videos of terrible driving and there's very few where the driver has attempted to grab a camera and I can't think of any where they've been successful. I'm fairly tall and muscular, so I don't think I'd be an obvious target and I try to not react emotionally to close passes, though that does take some practise.
My wife had one incident where she was shouting at a driver that dangerously obstructed her on a roundabout (i.e. he pulled straight out ahead of her when she was already on it) and he ended up going all the way round the roundabout in order to follow her. She was turning left just afterwards and he deliberately tried to swing the front of his car at her, either to scare, intimidate or injure her just after the corner - she shouted something like "it's on camera, b*ch" as she has trouble with emotional regulation. He then went ahead and pulled into a side road and exited his car, so he might have been about to assault her, but luckily her journey was about 50m further along at her mum's house, so she didn't find out. The police took her report and video seriously.
> I am indeed biased (I walk/cycle and don't drive), but that is irrelevant.
It's really not, not if it's informing your view more than fact and reason is.
I applaud you for providing some data (although none peer reviewed and published in standard journals from what I can see), but I have to be skeptical of their results.
Look at rideshare drivers as a counter - they typically have their phones mounted, and see new jobs, texts etc as they come in. If phones were so damaging, don't you think rideshare drivers would be involved in more incidents than most, and an uptick in accidents since ride-sharing became normal? Nothing like that has happened, though.
If the average is 23 seconds, I assume there's some elderly people skewing things, and the mode might be much closer to 5 or 10 seconds. The average in this case could very much be non-representative.
> People may start off being ultra careful with phone use, but unless there's some process to warn them, they end up using their phone more and more.
You could say this for anything though. By all means have zero tolerance and harsh penalties for using a phone while the vehicle is in motion, but I think some places even have laws punishing using a phone in the drivers seat in a parked car, which is just ridiculous.
> As far as "working" with the police, that's very much the line that the police bring out for encouraging the public to submit video evidence of traffic offences.
Sure.
> "Harmless behaviour that is common" - as discussed, the behaviour is not harmless which is precisely why the phone use law was introduced and why the police are interested in prosecuting for it.
I don't think you've made your case that the behavior is not harmless, and a more cynical guess at a motive might just be easy money.
> I don't think you've made your case that the behavior is not harmless, and a more cynical guess at a motive might just be easy money.
Well, I've provided some evidence that demonstrates that phone use is far more distracting than people believe - it's similar in my mind to the various tests of human perception such as "The Invisible Gorilla" whereby the brain fools people into thinking that they are perceptive and can see obvious objects, but actually testing their perception shows up a big mismatch between their expectations and their actual performance.
Presumably, the "easy money" you refer to is providing an incentive to police forces to prosecute phone using drivers, but the fines go to central government, not the local police forces, so apart from statistics, they have little incentive apart from the obvious traffic safety argument. Often, police forces seek to send a warning letter as it's easier for them to do so - that demonstrates that they are not focussing on fine revenues and are attempting to educate the problematic drivers.
One aspect we haven't touched upon is that it is a lot easier to prosecute drivers for using a phone whilst in control of a vehicle rather than only prosecuting drivers using a phone whilst in motion. I don't have a problem with drivers who pull in to the side of the road to use their phone, though the law does state that they should turn off their engine to do so. The difference between that and being stuck in traffic is that they have control over when they choose to rejoin the traffic flow and won't just blindly follow what they think the driver in front is doing.
This does remind me of an incident I had a while back. I was cycling along a dual carriageway and a tractor driver behind me used his horn aggressively (i.e. there was nothing that required the horn use) and then overtook. I passed him at the next set of lights at a roundabout and noticed that he was visibly using his phone, so of course the police got the full video (they require two minutes before and after incidents anyhow) and I was smugly satisfied to catch him out as aggressive behaviour can be down to interpretation, but not the phone use.
> Well, I've provided some evidence that demonstrates that phone use is far more distracting than people believe
But as I said, the average is not necessarily representative at all. Also, at least one of the sources would benefit from showing the problem to be bigger than it is.
> they have little incentive apart from the obvious traffic safety argument.
I don't believe so. They've undoubtedly got various performance measures for the various police forces, but I don't think they have a simple arrest quota for individual officers. If they did have to ramp up their numbers, then I think it'd be an easy job for a cycling officer with a camera to go around and capture all the blatant phone use. Unfortunately, when Avon&Somerset police (my area) provide a positive response to video submissions, they use a standard phrase like "As a result of this report I can confirm a positive outcome in that the driver(s) identified in the submission(s) will receive either a warning letter, a fixed penalty or a prosecution." which doesn't provide much feedback as to what action they are taking (a warning letter is barely an action though I do think they're a good idea). I have also had responses where they also mention a possible NIP (notice of intended prosecution).
As a counter-example of police just looking to make easy arrests, there plenty of reports on https://road.cc where certain forces (e.g. Lancashire) seem to bend over backwards to not take any action on cyclist submitted videos. It's a bit of a lottery as to which areas take things like close passes seriously or not.
Drivers are not able to quickly switch contexts between staring at a phone and looking around their vehicle and this "whatsapp-gap" is painfully obvious when cycling past slow/stopped traffic. It does lead to collisions with other road users - typically pedestrians and cyclists as drivers tend to only bother looking for other car-shaped vehicles and even more so when they're in the 30 second re-adjustment of their attention.
There is no "safe" use of a phone when driving - even using it in a cradle/hands-free which is legal in the UK, leads to a higher level of distraction and there would be a strong argument for making that illegal too, but we should focus more on enforcement of the existing traffic laws.
There's people like Mikey trying to make the world a bit better, and then there's people like you who make apologies for dangerous and illegal drivers. Maybe you should re-examine your attitude.