Safe Speed Forums

Traffic Police will NEVER sit on the hard shoulder in order to look for dangerous driving. One, because it's two damn dangerous and two, because you can't see anythng coming from behind you.

an ear-piece costs all of about £5, can't hurt to have one. Sort of makes you wonder why anyone is holding a phone while driving.

But - the law says you should not touch a button - not put the phone to your ear ---how do you do that with an earpiece??

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Mobile phones have had the ability to respond to verbal commands for at least 4 years, maybe it's time you upgraded if yours doesn't have that feature.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

Oh - yes - mine has that feature - but first yu have to press a key

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Time for you to upgrade then.

I get in the car, and the first thing that happens is my handset "pairs" with the ICE.
If I decide to to utter the word "call", then the ICE is muted while the handset waits for the name of the person to call.
When the call is over, the ICE is unmuted and I go back to whatever I was previously listening to, or whatever the kids were watching in the back seat.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

But if you only need to make a handful of in-car calls a year, what is the point of tooling yourself up prior to every journey?

Far better overall to wait and call back.

Obviously if you are always on the phone in the car, then a hands-free kit is pretty cheap. But does it really make you much safer?

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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

The only difference between talking on hands free & talking to a passenger, is that you won't automatically turn your head toward the passenger seat every so often to give the impression you are paying attention to what the other party has to say.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

Gix - you are self employed - now come back to the world of the employed -- we are dependant on our "masters " to provide" decent coms for us.

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Many would disagree - the danger factor is not so much the physical distraction of the hand-held phone but the focus on something outside the car. We have discussed this at great length in various thread

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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

No you're not.

My handset (XDA II) cost £100 offline from fleabay brand new in the box.
My head unit (Kenwood Media Centre) cost £230 from fleabay brand new in the box.

The rest of the crap in my car (speakers, amps, screens etc) is immaterial as it is not needed for the phone to physically function in handsfree mode via the ICE (although it's handy for keeping the kids quiet on long journeys).

If you are truly worried about being safety conscious, then a tad over £300 is sweet FA.


Please don't get me wrong here, "safety" wasn't at the forefront of my mind when I was buying all this crap (I buy it because I love technology), but it does have it's advantages and £300 isn't a lot to pay for a decent entertainment system and to have the ability for "true" handsfree in to the bargain.


There are a shed load of things going on outside the car that a driver could "focus" on, but they don't (I suspect if they did then the accident rate in the UK would a darn site higher than what it already is).

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

I guess it depends if you want to 'be prepared' or not. The 'tooling up' time is less than a second unless you've got the shakes and can't manage to stick a plug in a socket. Not that I ever bother... but then I don't tend to drive alone these days.


on top of what PeterE said another danger is that the person you're talking to can't see, hear or feel what's going on in your car so will keep talking to you when most passengers would have shut up and let you concentrate.

I can see your point Johnsher, but if I happen to be talking to someone on the phone and I decide that there is something more "pressing" that deserves my attention (eg, emergency braking going on in front), then I go "silent" on the phone while dealing with the issue.
It doesn't matter to me personally what the caller thinks, I can always explain to them afterwards why I appeared to "ignore" them and anybody with more than one brain cell will readily accept my apology for my apparent ignorance.

Granted not all people can react in this fashion, but (without meaning to appear conceited), I am one of those that can multitask & assign priorities in order.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

there's also plenty of people out there who'll tell you their driving isn't affected by an evening on the booze.

When I was a van driver on the minimum wage £300 was an awful lot of money.

Well we all know that cannot be true due to the way alcohol works on the brain, however medical testing before now has also shown that drivers under the influence of cocaine have a more heightened attention span than a driver that is drug free.

Based on that evidence, should we get the GP's to start handing out prescriptions in order to heighten people's attention spans before they get behind the wheel now?

Just because you don't seem to think it is possible to talk & drive at the same time (based on your own personal experience perhaps?), it doesn't mean that it cannot be done.
Watch the reality TV cop shows, and you will see time & time again a lone police officer using his radio while on pursuit and his driving is not degraded in any way at all.
And before you offer the explanation of it being done because the officer has been "trained", you can forget that because it is a mindset thing.
You can either do it, or you can't.....and if you can't then no amount of training will teach you otherwise.



As I said above, I didn't buy the phone or the head unit because I was thinking from a safety point of view. I bought the head unit because I wanted a decent sound system, and I bought the phone so I could run TomTom on it.
The fact that both are BlueTooth capable just happened to bring about the nice little side effect of having true hands free in the car.

The comment about whether you have the money or not for true hands free is a bit of a no brainer, because if you did have the money for the hands free then you would be spending it on a better equipped car to start with.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

Yes but the point I believe Botach was making is that it's different when it's a company van, different even to a company car. Most vans aren't allowed to be used for personal use(though often allowed for home to work) so there's no way I could have been able to justify or even afford over £300 on something purely for work. Yet there is probably just as much pressure to answer all the calls. If I didn't answer my company mobile they would immediately ring my personal mobile.

Yes I should have been able to defend my right to drive safely, but we all know that's not easy when van drivers are "10-a-penny" as I was told. The fact I felt unsafe(even on an old-fashioned hands-free) driving whilst on the phone was one of the reasons I saught employment elsewhere, which thankfully I did.

True - why we have thoe designated mounts to lurk on....

Would I have fined? Hard to say and it would depejd on the circumstance.

As aa young green - possibly may have followed the letter of the law

As seasoned and experienced cop - did deal with something similar and my reaction was - "Follow me to next exit or service station whichever comes first and I will sort you out" When we found a safer place to stop - I asked the person to stop and think why I suggested the course of action. If right answer no fine as point shoots home here - and if wrong answer - talking to and pointing out that fineable offence. but was prepared to accept genuine error for once.

Depends on circumstance but we do like to feel we do some good
sometimes... Also a little humanity does far more than a fine at times anyway.

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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.

I'm just going off what I've seen, and I HAVE seen traffic cars sat on the hard shoulder with blues and reds going. If these aren't traffic cars then I appologise, but they were deffinately police of some kind.

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

I can't beleive people are seriously talking about having 999 on some kind of voice dial.

They get enough crap to deal with from people sitting on the 9 button without it dialing out every time someone in the car says "Police" or whatever.