Driver on Phone on Google Street View

Pew_Pew_Pew_Lasers!

No, it isn't. You have no privacy in a public place. If you don't want to be photographed, go and wear a ninja outfit.

CHR15

Lum

thescouselander wrote: »

Come off it, truck and taxi drivers do not "know how to do it properly". They recieve no special training for this sort of thing and they are subject to the same human factors issues and physical limitations as everyone else. Take the guy in the picture, how do you suppose he kept hold of the steering wheel while changing gear with his left hand and holding his phone with his right hand?

While there may be no formal course for it, like most aspects of driving it's something you pick up with experience. Truckers have used CBs for a long time and have long established communications protocols designed to minimise time spent holding the mic, these are pretty easy to transfer to a mobile. The most important of said protocols is for the person not to get arsey if they don't get an immediate response, because it means the driver has something more important to worry about.

How to change gear, is an irrelevent question. If you have started your call just before you need to change gear then you have already done it wrong, if you don't know at least a minute or so in advance that you have a gear change coming up (ie. long enough to say "hold on a sec" and put the phone down) then you are doing it wrong. If you have to take sudden evasive action then chances are you have already failed to observe correctly but the correct procedure is to drop the damn phone and deal with the situation. It's the people that don't do this and carry on with the phone clamped to their ear even after all the cars in front have started slowing down that cause the accidents, not bloody truckers.

All the research shows that it's the conversation that causes the distraction, it's the conversation that you need to manage using methods such as those I described above and my personal experience pre and post ban is that handsfree actually makes it worse for an experienced person, simply because when you put the phone down the other person shuts up and no matter how angry they are getting that you are ignoring them, you don't have to listen. Wasn't a problem for me personally because all of my customers were fine with being asked to wait while I overtake this tractor, put phone down, select correct gear, wait for straight section, check it's still safe, perform overtake (if possible), resume normal driving, pick up phone, apologise and continue. 60,000 miles per year and no accidents other than getting hit from behind a few times in incidents totally unrelated to mobile phone use on my end.

Besides, your points are irrelivant, using a mobile while driving is illegal under the majority of circumastances - end of story. I'm not saying any action should (or shouldn't) be take in this particular case but I still think the bloke was being a prat.

Plenty of people in this thread have been going on about lives in danger and it is them that I am addressing. You are correct that as of 2006 or so the holding of a hand held mobile was made illegal, it's just unfortunate that this law fails to address the underlying problem of how to correctly manage a conversation whilst driving.

gsmmad

wow you have a lot of spare time

sunshinetours

There really are some sad people on the internet! Not specifically the OP but the psuedo police who think they have the absolute right to report and publicly flog the individual - luckily we are all 100% perfect isn't it.....