Getting Serious on Safety !

It must be obvious to any thinking person that we have lost the war on using mobile phones while driving cars.  Just stand near any high volume suburban road and count the cars whizzing by with drivers holding a mobile phone to their ear.  Even more dangerous are those with their eyes off the road, head down and texting messages.

This past weekend, just that turned to tragedy. A twenty-two year old male driving a Fiat van on Campbelltown road at Leumeah was approaching police setting up a breath testing station.  He was travelling at sixty kilometres an hour.  He admits that he took his eyes off the road for  about twenty seconds to concentrate on the text message and his vehicle crashed, pinning two police officers against the back of their parked police car.

Both police officers are in hospital in a serious condition with broken bones and one has had his foot amputated. The offending young driver has an appalling driving record.  He has lost his license four times in four years for accruing demerit points and was facing another loss before this accident. Some of those loss of points were because of his using a mobile phone while driving.

The lure of the phone is just too tempting for some people and we need a law change to curb that habit.   A simple signal suppressor will negate both incoming and outgoing phone traffic within a vehicle while the engine is running.  Getting caught using a mobile phone while driving should require such a suppressor to be fitted and the culprits driving  license be restricted to only apply to phone suppressed vehicles.

Unfortunately, that suppression would also apply to other passengers in that vehicle.  To make or receive a phone call the vehicle would need to pull over and switch off the engine.  That would be a suitable humiliation for drivers who ignored the law and the fear of its imposition would make compliance widespread.

It is obvious that both a heavy fine and loss of demerit points are not curbing this dangerous practice.The Australian death toll from road crashes is again rising and probably some of these can be attributed to driver inattention because of phone use.  Removing the ability to make or receive calls is a practical way of demanding compliance.

Exactly this same solution would quickly end the smuggling of mobile phones into the prison system. Mobile phone suppression would limit prison communications to the landline and allow all traffic to be monitored.  Criminal bosses run their crime empires from their cell and their need for smuggled mobile hones has pushed the reward level for corruption to spectacular levels.  As a result, smuggling is rife and the mobile phone is now more rewarding than even the drug supply.  The instrument is useless once a suppressor is in place and covering the prison.

Law enforcement is really the application of the " fear factor ".   If the rewards are great enough, many people continue to break the law - until that fear factor reaches an unacceptable level. Suppression concentrates the solution directly on those who can't - or won't - obey the law !