Herald on Sunday editorial: Car phone fools are a danger to everyone

Using a hand-held phone while driving is illegal and has been for five years. Photo / Thinkstock

Opinion

None of us needs convincing that to answer a phone while driving is highly dangerous. There is something about a telephone that dulls the vision. We notice it in others if we are in front of them when a phone rings. It is as though a person they cannot see needs their full attention to the exclusion of someone they can see.

Psychologists can probably explain this but they hardly need to. We know in ourselves that a phone call or text commands our immediate and full attention. If we are driving we know what an effort it becomes to watch the road.

We also know using a hand-held phone while driving is illegal and has been for five years. Yet Transport Ministry figures we have published today show the number of people caught calling or, heaven forbid, texting at the wheel, is steadily rising. This is not what normally happens when a rule is introduced for everybody's own good.

Compulsory seatbelts were controversial when the law was passed. The safety of being belted in was less obvious than the reason for the cellphone ban. Yet well within five years of seat belts becoming mandatory, just about every driver was complying without a second thought. To ride in a front seat without a belt soon felt decidedly unsafe.

Seatbelts serve only the interests of the wearer, the cellphone ban is for the safety of not only the driver but others on the road. Our common interests and common sense should have made it second nature by now never to pick up a phone while driving.

Yet observe a busy intersection as we did for 90 minutes in central Auckland last week, and there will a number breaking the law.

What more can be done? Hands-free car phones are available, though they probably reduce visual concentration too. Phones can be provided with automated messages telling callers you are driving and their call will be returned.

The law is probably being enforced as strongly as it can be. The increase in infringement notices, from 500 in the first year of the ban to 2000 last year, suggests the police are stopping those they happen to see. Cameras could be used to identify more offenders. The maximum penalty, an $80 fine 20 demerit points, could be increased.

But the most effective law enforcement is often social disapproval. Research we have reported today shows the reaction times of drivers on a phone is about twice that of a driver on cannabis or at the permitted alcohol limit.

Social disapproval of drink driving has begun to influence most people's attitudes and behaviour; phone-driving should be disgusting, too. It is dangerous and dumb.