What are we going to do about the hand held mobile phone menace that is now an epidemic amongst around 35% of the UK's motorists? In the last 2 years or so I never make a journey no matter how short and not see some cretin either jabbering on their phone or texting/tweeting etc. In my experience this is most prevalent, but not exclusive to, the 17-30 year old age group, male and female. These are not quick 30 second emergency calls (although in 99% of cases this is still no excuse) but long drawn out conversations where you can be driving behind someone for 5-10 minutes whilst the offender in front weaves erratically through junctions and roundabouts etc without signalling (there's only so much you can do with one hand) with a moronic grin on their face.
The penalties are nowhere near tough enough when caught which most offending motorists never are, hence no real deterrent. More in line with how serious an offence this is would be a driving ban. That may at least focus the minds of a percentage of the offenders. It really needs to become as socially unacceptable as drink driving is as, currently, enforcing the hand held phone offence has become almost impossible for the police. It took 2 or 3 generations for drink driving to become taboo and sadly I fear it could take the same amount of time for using hand held mobiles whilst driving to reduce too. It will take many more preventable deaths and catastrophic collisions for the 21st century motorist to realise it just isn't worth it.
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