"ceg" wrote in message ...

On Sun, 16 Aug 2015 21:50:10 +0100, Gareth Magennis wrote:

The UK figures seem to suggest that "skyrocketing mobile phone
ownership" does not actually mean that more people are using
their phones whilst driving.

After all, everyone has one now, surely.

In the USA, I would agree that almost every driver has one, and, in fact,
there are usually as many cellphones in the vehicle as there are kids and
adults over the age of about middle school.

In fact, with tablets and cameras and gps devices also abounding, the
number of "distracting" electronic devices probably exceeds the number of
occupants in the car, such that we can consider 100% to be a somewhat
conservative number (counted as the number of devices per vehicle).

So, it's no wonder that, after almost every accident that the police
investigate, they can confidently check the convenient box for "was a
cellphone found in the vehicle?".

So, what you're saying is that only a small percentage of people who
*own* the cellphones are actually *using* them while driving.





Well it may not be a sound logic to assume that 1.5% is a "small" number.
Stand at the side of a motorway and count 100 cars passing. It won't take
long.

These statistics simply show that 1.5 of those passing cars contains a
driver on the phone, and that this number has not increased since 2003.

That sounds like a significant problem to me though.



Gareth.