After a year of watching and waiting, Canberra’s mobile phone detection cameras are about to strike.
Drivers snapped with a phone on their lap or in their hands by the overhead-mounted cameras will be issued an infringement and demerit points from Tuesday next week (20 February).
Ha, only $600? Yous have it easy down in the ACT. The fine here in Queensland is double that. The same cameras also do seatbelts, which have an equal fine.
Personally I’m not a fan of the fact that it applies even when stopped at lights. It should maybe still be an offence, but a different and significantly lesser one.
I hate knowing every light i stop at, the moron infront from the moment they got there is staring at their phone and not watching the light.
I shouldn’t he six cars back see the light go green and be ready to take off while the idiot is on tbeir phone waiting for a beep or the world to move around them
Don’t get me wrong, I hate that shit too. But I think it’s also important to note that it’s just obviously categorically less bad than using your phone while driving along at 60 km/h.
Oh yeah definitely way worse if you’re moving
Maybe it should only start scanning 5 seconds before the light changes, so only people distracted when their time has come to move get fined.
So i don’t think the setup here would work at traffic lights. The counter argument is that if you’re not moving when the light goes green you’re probably creating congestion in the network, when people get annoyed they become worst drivers and do stupid things like run reds (My personal most annoying traffic behaviour seen far too often in Canberra).
Nobody who crashes their car after using their phone is thinking “well, at least I got that super important message off”. And that’s for best-case situations where nobody is hurt.
Whatever the message is, it can wait. If it really can’t wait, then people really do need to get off the road to read/reply.
I think speed vans are terrible due to people randomly slamming on their brakes and paying more attention to the speedo then the road. The mobile phone cameras (which incidentally can tell how fast you are driving but aren’t being used for that yet ) i’m generally pro as people who are on their phones wander all over their lanes and into others. Seatbelts are also something that you really should be wearing.
Blutooth chat pad like on an xbox controller, screen mirror to your stereo system.
Type away
Just need a little T9 pad on the steering wheel, once people get good at it they won’t even have to look down to text while driving.
A boring dystopia
Pretty much. I don’t like how many people are on their phones while driving (particularly when I’m on the bike) but am also not a fan of reversing the onus of proof just because you want to use cameras to enforce rules instead of police.
At least the cameras aren’t particularly hidden so it’s more of an attention test than anything - if you don’t notice the mobile ones you probably were paying too much attention to your phone.
How does this reverse the onus of proof? The cameras are pretty excellent quality, the photo of you holding the phone is the proof of the offence of holding a phone.
The problem is that the photos are often not of sufficient quality to prove the object being held is a phone, so you end up with situations like how NSW amended their Road Transport Act with the stated intention to “establish a presumption that an object held by, or resting on, the driver of a vehicle in a photograph taken by an approved traffic enforcement device that is approved for mobile phone use is a mobile phone for the purposes of a mobile phone offence, unless the driver satisfies the court that the object was not a mobile phone”.
There was a case in Queensland early on where the driver claimed it was an iPod touch.
It ended up being the case that it was actually an iPhone, but the judge found that the driver was honest in his claims that it was only being used as an iPod (because it did not have a SIM card at the time). The law was quickly amended to fix this loophole.
