On Sun, 16 Aug 2015 23:14:45 +0000 (UTC), ceg
wrote:

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.

If this is the case, then that might solve the paradox.

Q: Where are the accidents?
A: They don't exist
Q: Why not?
A: Because only a small percentage of people are dumb enough to cause an
accident by using their cellphone while driving.

But, if that is true (and it might be), then why bother with a *law* if
people are *already* so very responsible such that 98.5% of them wouldn't
think of using their cellphone while driving?

That then becomes the second paradox?

PARADOX 2: If 98.5% of the drivers are already such responsible users of
cellphones, then why the need for the laws that penalize cellphone use
while driving?


That's easy.
1) the world is full of control freaks that live for ways to make
other people toe the line (usually arbitrarily drawn) whether those
other people need to or not.
2) Gvt wants as many laws as it can possibly have regardless of need.
That is clear by the fact that they add thousands of laws while at
the same time eliminating virtually no law no matter how antiquated
and inapplicable it is to modern society.

You see it in the newsgroups all the time. Someone "thinks" X is bad
and wants to make it illegal. They have ZERO data showing it's bad
but they are sure it is and that's all they need to criminalize it.
These same moronic nanny's are the same kind of people who love to get
elected to home owners associations and gvt.