Get off your bloody phone

[Daffyd]

Mine never seemed to work very well after lunch on Fridays for some reason

Funny that... Mine neither.

[Graystone]

Amen.

Not that I agree with phone use while driving.

1973 was our worst ever road toll. 843. No phones back then.

Without phones I guess everyone had to drive home so they could swipe right and post tweets, all the rushing and frustration, no wonder the road toll was so high.

[PrincessBandit]

I went to try turning the volume up to hear my google maps instructions getting from one relatively unkown part of the city to another (phone was sitting in between passenger and drivers seat) and I accidentally managed to call emergency services! Hastily pulled over to try and end the call before it was answered. Still got an immediate call from them asking what my emergency was. Must admit I mumbled about accidentally activating the service (certainly did not mention it was while I was driving!!)

[FJRider]

I went to try turning the volume up to hear my google maps instructions getting from one relatively unkown part of the city to another (phone was sitting in between passenger and drivers seat) and I accidentally managed to call emergency services! Hastily pulled over to try and end the call before it was answered. Still got an immediate call from them asking what my emergency was. Must admit I mumbled about accidentally activating the service (certainly did not mention it was while I was driving!!)

Give yourself an infraction for that. Maybe a few weeks with a pink tinge on your computer/phone screen.

[FJRider]

Mine never seemed to work very well after lunch on Fridays for some reason

My phone was 10 years old when I got it ... 10 years ago (for $10).

The fact that it still works is surprising enough ... without any other factors involved ... but it WAS cheap.

[Fresh Oats]

Ehh I dunno. I've never really had an experience of drivers near missing me while on their phones.
All the near misses I've had have all been because the car hasn't been able to see me (or didn't have a good enough look more likely) past another car and have pulled out infront of me.
But even this you can see coming if you look for the driver. If you can't see the driver, chances are they can't see you.

That's not to say it's not a problem. But some stats would be interesting.

[Berries]

But some stats would be interesting.

Good luck with that. Some drivers do admit that they were distracted by their phone, either talking on it, texting on it or trying to find it under the seat. Most would rather blame the big black dog that ran out or the possum that caused them to swerve, or the car coming the other way that crossed the centreline and then mysteriously vanished. Or the bee. It would only be a relative handful of crashes where the Police go looking for phone provider data.

A number of countries like NZ bottomed out with the road toll a few years ago and have been rising since. A commonly held view is that it is the increasing use of cell phones that is behind it. Probably some truth to it when you think about it.

[pritch]

I had a small excitement on my moped heading home for lunch one day. I did write it up previously but it fits here.

A woman in a Remuera tractor pulled out of a side street, she immediately crossed on to my side of the road and accelerated straight toward me. She was looking down at her lap. Whether she was fiddling with her phone or scratching her snatch I couldn't say. I was eyeing the kerb but it was one of those large square section kerbs and I was just starting to think, "this is going to hurt", when she looked up and yanked the wheel.

Fuck her, whatever she was doing.

[Moi]

... Fuck her, whatever she was doing.

I'm guessing you're speaking figuratively...

Better for her and her like... a ducking stool in the village pond

[pritch]

I'm guessing you're speaking figuratively...

I guess. If she'd hit me I could'a been fucked.

[Black Knight]

I heard from a pretty reliable source recently that Auckland Police are having a crackdown on drivers using cellphones to talk and text.
It seems that it has finally got through that inattention is causing accidents (didn't take long did it)-Instuctions have come down from on high that every patrolling officer is expected to issue a minimum of one ticket a day to offending drivers.Could be interesting.

[GazzaH]

I vaguely recall from an unknown and probably unreliable source that the main issue with cellphones is mental distraction, not so much the act of looking away from the road at the screen.

[pete376403]

I vaguely recall from an unknown and probably unreliable source that the main issue with cellphones is mental distraction, not so much the act of looking away from the road at the screen.

So why doesn't the stereo /radio / passenger talking cause the same level of distraction? How is a cop able to use the RT without being similarly distracted?

[granstar]

"Suspect that this may not even be physically possible, due to either
driver injury or to lack of driver willingness to admit the circumstances."

If they have the time of the accident and the phone number they can tell if the driver was on a call at the time. This has been used in the past although it may not be routine.

Young lady 19 in her prime known to my daughter driving a car went through a bridge fence barrier then submerged into the water. The deceased's phone was in her hand when divers extracted her, certainly a wake up call to a lot of people.

[rambaldi]

I vaguely recall from an unknown and probably unreliable source that the main issue with cellphones is mental distraction, not so much the act of looking away from the road at the screen.

That seems like it may have been the case back when calling was all a phone could do. And then there was texting, but most teenagers could do that blindfolded on the old button based phones. These days its all the facebooks and the twitters and the instagrams where you need to look at the screen to get your dopamine hits.