[wildhorses]

Originally Posted by spot

There's the difference between an evidence-led policy on mobile phones and one which relies on opinion. You're setting your opinion up against the UK's national traffic research unit. The national traffic research unit relies on peer review for its reputation. if it had no reputation it would be dead in the water and nobody would pay its bills much less quote its results.

If you can produce any evidence which contradicts their findings then great, that would be perfect, I'd be delighted. Fire away. That's all we need, a way of assessing the reputation of the people making the statements.

If I may summarise Christine's added list from her first post of the thread, there's a currently a ban on hand-held cellphone use in vehicles with the engine running in six states, California, Connecticut, D.C., New Jersey, New York and the Virgin Islands. Jurisdictions are allowed to impose bands on hand-held use in a further five states, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The other thirty nine states allow the driver to hold mobile phone voice calls, hand-held and hands-free, while the vehicle's engine is running and even if the vehicle's in motion.

Nobody anywhere has a ban on hands-free systems. In my opinion the reason for that is an inability to stop people and book them for doing it because it's undetectable at the time they're doing it. In the UK, if someone's been in a lethal crash and the phone company records show the surviving driver was on his hands-free phone at the time, I guarantee they'll go to jail for it because the crash is going to be put forward as evidence of their dangerous behaviour. People here are in jail just for changing radio stations while crashing.

How in the hec would they know if someone was trying to change the radio station when they crashed? LOL. What do they use for evidence in court?