OK perhaps the posting on youtube is a foolish thing to do, but my point is that Police are getting more empowered to use this information against the individual. I'm unsure as to whether the following scenario has come to fruition or not, but I wonder if the humble sat nav has been used as evidence in the persecution / prosecution of a speeding motorist? Put it this way, who in their wildest dreams would have thought that you could be nicked for eating an apple whilst driving? then to take it one step further towards insanity, the car was stopped whilst in traffic, not moving but with the engine running, certainly not I. Speeding or driving in general is just the thin end of the wedge that would ultimately lead us towards a Stasi state, where citizens are encouraged to grass each other up. The rise of wannabe Police with dash cams, will grow, and before you know it your big brother will become big brother. Right then 59-60 cm or size Large in a helmet; for the interested thats the size for my tin foil hat.
Chairman of the bench Ken Buck said: "We accept that there are times when you can drive with one hand, but, in holding an apple while negotiating a left hand turn, we consider you not to have been in full control. "We are therefore satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that this case is proved." i blame the courts.....
You can't blame the courts if the CPS and or Police want to interpret the word of the law in a fashion that could make anything from changing radio stations to sneezing an offence. Whichever way you look at it it's a nasty system.
The underlying purpose of laws about road behaviour is to prevent, or at least discourage, carelessness, inattention, and incompetence while driving. Measures are designed not merely to punish after collisions have happened, but to discourage excessive risk-taking. The problem is that it is very difficult to catch someone for being careless, and almost impossible to prove that someone was being inattentive. So the principal approach has long been to rely mainly on proxy measures. Driving at X mph, or having X mg of blood alcohol, are banned because it is easy to catch offenders, easy to measure breaches by use of technology, and easy to prove offences. People who breach the arbitrary figures defined by law supposedly approximate to the people who are likely to drive in a careless, inattentive, incompetent manner. The same applies to the eating an apple / talking on the phone cases; the acts are not in themselves harmful, but are proxy indicators of carelessness. No doubt in many cases the proxy is reasonably accurate. Unfortunately in many other cases the proxy measure is wholly irrelevant, and does not indicate carelessness at all. Even more unfortunately, some of the more dim-witted agents of law enforcement have lost sight of the purpose of the exercise and have come to regard speed limits as having some special magic significance in themselves. Therein lies the current difficulty.
So its still the fault of the dim witted agents of law, even though their direction is decided by the powers that be, who also provide them with Proxy measures to rely on, those proxy measures which are created by the powers that be because someone far cleverer than the dim witted agents of law decided thats the best way to counteract the average member of the public who are likely to drive in a careless inattentive incompetent manner needs a measurable element of control..... therein lies the current difficulty..........oh and the facts that most who are likely to exceed these proxy measures have never had any further training to a standard to equip them to exceed the proxy measures and secondly most of them have a perception that their ability is far greater than their actual ability.....
So tell me about your level of road riding or driving ability then Loz......are you worthy of an exemption ....?
Indeed, that is no doubt correct. Glad you said "most". May I add to those two matters the further point that many people are insufficiently afraid because they fail to appreciate danger. They embark upon hazardous actions in a dangerous environment in a casual and insouciant way, as though they were strolling in the park. If they were more frightened they would concentrate harder!
I haven't died yet and I've never hurt another road user. I am what you would call, "lucky", Andy. My level of expertise is lucky. I am lucky by design. How about you, Andy? Competent, excellent, godlike, police standard or club racer standard? Where do you put yourself on the scale?
Good grief this looks like it's getting a bit hot. Right then, using the apple as an example, can someone be kind enough to explain the reason that up until very recently no one was persecuted for the simple act? To clarify, I accept that speeding, and general disobedience on the roads constituted, an without labouring a point other examples of disobediences would be things like jumping lights, crossing white lines, etc. So how did it come to pass that either CPS or Police can suddenly decide that eating the said apple constitutes an offence? I might concede that the new law of using a mobile whilst driving was carried out in the name of safety, however eating whether it be an apple or a pear hasn't to the best of my knowledge caused an accident.
Eating an apple does not, of course, constitute an offence. Driving carelessly constitutes an offence, and alsways has done; eating an apple (or doing many and various other things) whilst driving constitutes evidence of carelessness.
OK then I'll rephrase, using the same example why wasn't the careless driving used to persecute before ?
