Safe Speed Forums

The van and the lady comment: Their ability is one thing, but the law is equal, and initially does not take into account driver ability. The van driver was not in proper control of his vehicle because he was eating. The same rule would therefore apply to our apple bandit, whether she was driving in a straight line or not. The van driver was lucky, I like to educate motorists rather than hammer them all the time.

There is of course much more to safe driving than having both hands on the wheel. However it is good driving practice to keep both hands on the wheel whilst driving.

In any case she was found guilty of not being in proper control of her vehicle. (don't start, I know the courts are not allways right, but they are on this occaision)

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'Detritus, get yer stoney arse over ere'

Err.. how about smoking? A police view on that and its enforcement?

And where does common sense come into the equation?
Does the law have to be enforced to the letter simply because it's the law? If that's the case, kindly direct me to the nearest cliff so I can jump off.
There's a huge difference between actually driving in a dangerous manner (as in the case of the van driver) and potentially doing something or the other (in the case of the apple-eater)
If we're to be punished for doing something which could potentially cause danger, then we should receive a FPN every time we start our engines.

And it's not just that - why could the magistrate have not made a judgement on the case the first time round, rather than drawing it out into such a huge fiasco?

Do they spend so much effort and money in the case of drug-fuelled scrotes who beat up old ladies for £5?

IMHO it's you who are now taking the proverbial.

Regards
Peter

Found this on the net, Scottish Executive 26 Jan 2005, oh my look at what's 1st on the list.


AAA STUDY

4.16 The AAA foundation for Traffic Safety funded the University of North Carolina to interrogate the NASS-CDS database in order to attempt to identify how many accidents were caused by driver distraction (Stutts et al, 2001). The report also contained narrative searches (qualitative searches) of the database of CDS and North Carolina data. 1995 was the year that ‘driver inattention’ was included as a code in the NASS-CDS taxonomy. The AAA study amalgamates data from 1995-1999 to create an average.

4.17 The report defined driver distraction as a situation ‘where a driver is delayed in the recognition of information needed to safely accomplish the driving task because some event, activity, object, or person within or outside the vehicle compelled or tended to induce the driver’s shifting attention away from the driving task’ (Stutts et al, 2001: 6). They specifically exclude ‘looked but did not see’ incidents, and Task Unrelated Thought (TUT). The form had a section for ‘Driver Attention Status’, which consisted of five subcategories: ‘Attentive, Distracted, Looked but Didn’t See, Sleepy or Fell Asleep, Unknown/No Driver’. Only if the driver was noted as being ‘Distracted’ was a further series of options made available to describe why the driver was distracted. Here there were thirteen separate headings.


Eating or drinking
Outside person, object or event
Adjusting radio, cassette or CD
Other occupants in vehicle
Moving object in vehicle
Smoking related
Talking or listening on Cellular Phone
Dialling cellular phone
Using device/object brought into vehicle
Using device/controls integral to vehicle
Adjusting climate controls
Other distraction
Unknown distraction

4.18 It will be seen that category 1, and categories 3-13 represent ‘inside distracters’, with only category 2 representing ‘outside distracters’.


See it's a distraction

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'Detritus, get yer stoney arse over ere'

I can see your point pete, but what should they have done. Our apple eater could have carried on her journey event free, or could have been distracted by her apple eating and killed someone. (see my extract from Scotish Executive about distractions).
PS I would have told her off!

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'Detritus, get yer stoney arse over ere'

On a slightly different issue.

If the police, by their own admission, had to expend all the reported money and effort to gather evidence as the case was contested does this mean that the original ticket was issued by the police officer without sufficient evidence of the offence?

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

According to that list, so is "Using device/controls integral to vehicle", so would you like to prosecute someone for using their indicators, or even the steering wheel itself - which, after all, is a control integral to the vehicle... What that list indicates is that the items listed could be a distraction, and were a distraction in the particular cases examined in the report, it doesn't prove that they are a distraction in every single instance.

Should I admit to taking a quick sip from a small bottle of pepsi whilst travelling in a straight line in ideal weather and traffic conditions along L1 of the eastbound M4 last week? It was either that or risk a coughing fit brought on by a very dry throat, and I leave it to your imagination to figure out how allowing that to occur could in any way be considered beneficial to road safety... At no time did my eyes leave the road ahead (my girlfriend opened the bottle, placed it directly into my hand, then took it back off me and resealed it once I'd finished), and my left hand was off the wheel for little longer than it would have taken to change gear had I been driving a manual. Under those conditions, the safety of my drive was not compromised in any way, and had I been penalised for acting in this way I'd have felt entirely justified in complaining about it. On the other hand, if I'd attempted the same task a few minutes later whilst negotiating the link curve between M4 e/b and M25 s/b, I'd have accepted the penalty with little or no complaint - single-lane, relatively tight bend (by motorway standards), significant changes in incline leading to increased concentration required to maintain a safe speed, other slip roads merging/diverging leading to greater risk of conflict with other vehicles... definitely not the conditions to be doing anything other than driving the vehicle.

So fair enough, the letter of the law may state that eating/drinking whilst driving is a no-no, but if that law is to have any respect (and where have I heard this argument before, I wonder...) it MUST be applied in a common-sense way so as to penalise only those people who are both breaking the law AND in doing so creating a clear and present danger to themselves or other road users. Merely taking a sip of drink or a bite of food is not, in itself, dangerous. It's the context in which that action occurs which defines the danger. If the law does not or cannot recognise this context, then the law is a bad one.

Sheffield Traffic Cops!!!!!!





Each time I watch I am tempted to call my oppo there - as the "star" of the show who appears in each programme is frequently filmed nursing the gear stick! That is not the example he should be setting.

As for the one-armed drivers - car is usually adapted (automatics, etc)

However, on the subject of the woman and the apple.

Apples are round and roll. If she'd dropped it - she'd have lost control of the car.

I have sat in the drive holding an apple and the steering wheel just now. I found it very awkard to turn the wheel holding it. I whacked the car into reverse and inched the car backwards and found I could not change gear, keep the wheel straight and hold apple at same time. The only way I could do this was by holding the apple between my teeth. This was the same when I then returned the car to the driveway in my little "highly uinscientific experiment" Mind you - did choose the largest apple in the fruit bowl!

Would I have prosecuted? Possibly. Would have depended on whether I thought she would learn from a sharp word or whether I thought there was a possibilty she'd do so again. A lot would depend on what was actually seen regarding the standard of driving and risk potential.

As I spelled out in the "Careless v Reckless" thread - we look at conduct where the act of undue care etc is due to more than a momentary lapse/ inattention and the effect of that act on the road safety of other road users, and whether the act would comprised the ability to respond in an emergency situation.

People can choke on apples! But - if the person had given me no evidence of not being in full control other than taking a chomp from the apple - (as per the officer's reported testimony in the court) I would probably have given the mother and father of tickings off.

The case itself? I've had two of our "cats" bending my ear over something they heard on the radio - and I have yet to listen to this. They say they heard the defence lawyer state that the woman was charged with careless driving after the local press reported the incident in which she apparently criticised the fixed penalty. I did not see the original local press report either - so I do not know how she was quoted either.


Perhaps the paper quoted her as saying she'd challenge the fine - and this provoked the further actions.

It seems the in-car video had run out of tape - so they had no photogrpahic evidence of the road or the act itself. This is probably why they decided to provide an aerial view of the layout to build the case. The aeroplane as I understand provided a decent photo of the road in question and showed the potential hazard. The chopper filmed the wrong road! (according to the gabblings I got on the phone by not very tame pussycats! ). But have yet to find a bit of spare time to listen to the programme via the website.

What does strike me as strange is that the officer did say her driving was not careless and that she was in control of the car. He gave the penalty because of the risk factor. Personally - think more discretion should have been used if this were the case.

If my lads dish out any fixed penalties - we explain every small detail to our customer. We explain very politely why we are taking this action, time scale to pay the fine and surrender licence for points, and we do mention that they do have rights to challenge in court if they disagree with the charges, etc, etc.

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

To try to take this a little further, let me pose the question:

What does it mean to be in control?

It seems to me that being in control is very much a state of mind.

What if we let go of the steering wheel completely for a second or two? Surely we're in contol for as long as the car is doing what we want it to. It's when the car fails to follow the intended path that we are not in control.

What does it mean to be in proper control? Is that something entirely different to being in control?

Perhaps there's an issue of risking losing control, and if we (for example) steer with one hand then perhaps we should judge that we are less able to react in an emergency?

But even this idea of "reacting in an emergency" is pretty misleading. Getting into a situation where you may need to react in an emergency is usually the result of a serious error, and shouldn't we be far more concerned about the original mistake?

Anyway, "reacting in an emergency" is a pretty hit and miss affair. Every time you react in an emergency there's something like a 1 in 5 or a 1 in 10 chance of crashing. Those sorts of odds are entirely unknown in normal driving.

There you go... food for thought I hope.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

There's a fuller report on this.
Here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 23,00.html

So.
Geoffrey Forrester, for the defence, told South Tyneside magistrates that Miss McCaffery had been driving in dry conditions, that there was no traffic or pedestrians and that the manoeuvre was carried out perfectly

The dispute between Miss McCaffery, who lives in Hebburn, and the police began on December 4, 2003. In an interview given before yesterday’s court hearing, she described how she took the same route to work in her Ford Ka as she had done for four years. As she negotiated a left turn with an apple in her right hand she was still in second gear when she saw the blue lights of a police car

PC Lee Butler had spotted her driving with her right hand by her face and believed that she may have been using a mobile phone, the court was told.

When he discovered that she was holding a half-eaten apple, he issued her with a £30 fixed-penalty ticket. The nurse, however, said before yesterday’s 2½-hour trial: “I wasn’t speeding or swerving around. It was a small apple and I had both hands on the steering wheel when I turned into the road. The apple was in my right hand but I could still hold the steering wheel and steer the car.”



So it's: 'dry conditions, no traffic or pedestrians and that the manoeuvre was carried out perfectly, It was a small, half eaten apple and she had both hands on the steering wheel' !

Hmm, If she'd "dropped the apple, she would lose control of the car" as suggested by I-G. err why?

Neil, You stopped a driver who claimed to be "eating a sandwich" (taking all of "a couple of minutes"? and "swerving in the road" )

Did you actually see the sandwich?
Could he have been looking at his A-Z (or using a mob phone, or...both of these !) but not willing to admit this to you?

I'm thinking if she'd dropped it and it rolled beneath a pedal or she'd started looking for it instead of driving as people quite surprisingly do.

Must go out and try driving the car out of the drive with a smal half eaten apple in my hand though - and have quite large hands.

I am surprised he gave her the fixed penalty in the first place though. I'd have been inclined to give her a rollicking and left it at that. Doubt she'd have touched a sucky sweet afterwards!

_________________
Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

Reckon she'd have just ended up with a horrible green appley mess in the footwell. On the other hand, some things would be a worry. Anyone fancy the diea of a coconut rolling under the brake pedal? Okay, silly example, but I can imagine an unopened dinks can or bottle getting wedged. Have been in a car where throttle pedal got stuck on the carpet, in a nearly all the way down postion. It was a V12 with an auto box, so very Hence not a fan of anything that can bugger up the pedels. Even something fairly squishy like an apple.

Think plod over reacted in her case, but all in all I don't have too much sympathy for the driver. I'm not going to condemn her having done similar things behind the wheel in early 20s, but I feel that was a symptom of my bad attitude toward driving back then. As an inexperienced driver like many others I didn't think I had a great deal to learn once I'd passed my test. Looking back now i consider that lighting up a fag myself, eating, drinking (non-alky stuff though, wasn't a complete eejit), and so on showeed that my attitude was a problem. My priority was clearly not on my driving. Can't say the same for nursey... maybe her attitude was simply that she was a bit short on vit C. I don't know that she wasn't concentrating on driving, but I don't feel that it's unquestionable that she was.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Yes, I tend to agree. It's a case of six of one and half a dozen of another,

To my mind you see far too many people nowadays driving around chomping on sandwiches or chocolate bars or drinking water from bottles. Perhaps statistically it isn't a major cause of crashes, but it is symptomatic of a generally rather slapdash approach to driving.

If this case has made some people think twice about doing it, it will have done some good.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

I strongly disagree with that.

I think the major effect of this sort of case is to trivialise road safety.

Just as sticking to the speed limit is no guarantee of safety, neither is "not eating" a guarantee of safety. But this dumb list of "don'ts" ends up in the public consciousness as a part of the road safety culture. It's negative and it's trivial. We need to make positive important messages not negative unimportant ones.

So I reckon it's positively harmful.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

1} Of course.
2} Make sure you have 'both hands on the steering wheel' !
3} Surprised.... aren't we all?

BTW, Went out to my car earlier, made a fist on edge of the steering wheel, (no apples, kids ate 'em all ) other hand on the gearstick, spun the car into the drive, reversed out, and back in again from a different angle, no problem!
(Wouldn't do this as the norm though)

Totally agree Paul.

This case is also all about simply the misuse of power by small minded people in authority who cannot face being challenged.

IG - as for the 'risk' of her dropping the apple and it interfering with the pedals, the logical extension of this is to FPN anyone who has anything in the rear seat footwell, on any of the seats or even the rear parcel shelf - they could roll under the pedals- its happened to me in the past. And most people's cars are mobile shopping baskets anyway !

No, we are absolutely not in control. The fact that the car is going where we want it to is incidental, controlling a manually operated machine such as a car cannot be accomplished by mere willpower alone. But this is what we would be relying on if we take our hands off the wheel, i.e. we could not initiate a change of course without placing our hand(s) back on the wheel.

I believe that this case highlights the gap which exists between the publics' perception of what the police should be prosecuting people for, and what it is within their powers to propsecute for. To most people bustling through their busy day, the act of taking a swig from a water bottle or a bite from a Mars bar, not to mention answering the mobile, will be something they can relate to - millions of us have done this whilst driving our cars. In fact many would argue that it's unrealistic to expect people not to do these things, when the alternative is to try and find somewhere to park up, wasting precious time.
I don't admit to having a difinitive standpoint on this; on the one hand I can relate to Twister's tale about grabbing a mouthful of drink to stave off a coughing fit. But on the other hand I know I'd be a little peeved if someone ran into my vehicle whilst juggling an apple causing me the inconvenience of having my car repaired - or worse. Guess I'm a bit of a fence sitter here

Rigpig,

so WHY has smoking whilst driving not been banned (as a specific offence)??

...or is that not dangerous?

I believe that this case highlights the gap which exists between the police's perception of reality, and what is reality!

mb

Paul's point about "in control" is an interesting one...

Perhaps a reasonable definition of "in control" would be something like "paying attention to the job in hand and ready to respond to a change of events". In other words it's a mental state rather than a physical one.

Taking the example of removing your hands from the wheel for a second or two, then I would tend to agree that if your judgement suggests there is no reason to expect to have to make a sudden steering movement, then you are "in control".

The instinctive reaction to this is "what if something unexpected happens?", but I'm not entirely sure that holds water. The same logic applies to the brake pedal surely - so are we "not in control" whenever we have a foot on the accelerator?

It may well be that the driver who's mind is on the job but who's hands are elsewhere is nevertheless able to respond more quickly to a sudden requirement to steer than a driver who's hands are on the wheel but who's mind is elsewhere.

No, as far as enforcement is concerned, the acid test of "not in proper control" should be whether observation of the vehicle's movements demonstrates proper control or not, rather than where their hands happen to be at a particular "snapshot" moment.

A further example:

Driver A habitually drives with both hands gripping the wheel at quarter to three, and makes smooth guided movements, passing the wheel positively from hand to hand during tight maneuvres. He steers like this for the entirety of a 200 mile journey, except for one 30 second interval where he uses one hand to hold a small apple and apply it to his mouth.

Driver B habitually drives with one hand on the gearknob and the other elbow resting on the window frame.

Who is displaying the most "proper control"?

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

I'm not disagreeing, but seriously Paul I think that this is strongly influncd by the way the media reports things. Being honest none of us here are in any position to make a qualitive judgement on how much her driving was impaired, if at all. But to chuck a hypothetical in, say I'm driving along eating an apple next week, and not doing too good a job of it, and attract the attention of that rarest of things... a Thames Valley Police patrol car So I get done for driving without due care and attention, and sure as hell i'm guilty. But what gets reported ends up being about silly plods doing another driver for possesion of fruit.

Absolutely the way things come across in the media is all in the wrong order. And sure that comes from the top in the form of some of the dafter Think ads. But I do think the press are responsible for some of this by chucking irrelevancies into their reporting and stressing the wrong points. Sells papers I suppose.

Where I think the over reaction was is in the mad waste of manpower and resources to get this driver, and how OTT it was compared to the fine she was going to get. That was bound to get unwanted media attention, so someone wasn't thinking IMO.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein