by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-12 17:17:22+00:00
I am indeed biased (I walk/cycle and don't drive), but that is irrelevant.

Studies show "up to 27 seconds" to fully re-focus after using a phone: https://www.science.org/content/article/talking-car-or-smart...

Average of 23 seconds: https://www.cmtelematics.com/blog/the-distraction-hangover-p...

Not sure if this is rigorous, but 34% of crashes occur within 60 seconds of phone distraction: https://www.onfocus.news/new-study-34-of-crashes-happen-with...

The problem with trying to justify phone use when driving is the "normalisation" effect. People may start off being ultra careful with phone use, but unless there's some process to warn them, they end up using their phone more and more. One advantage of Mikey's shopping in of phone users is that it provides at least some negative adjustment of drivers' phone use.

I won't address your remarks about Mikey as they are largely matters of opinion, though I seriously doubt that he makes anything more than pocket change from his work and likely that is swallowed up by the costs incurred with buying bike cams.

As far as "working" with the police, that's very much the line that the police bring out for encouraging the public to submit video evidence of traffic offences.

"Harmless behaviour that is common" - as discussed, the behaviour is not harmless which is precisely why the phone use law was introduced and why the police are interested in prosecuting for it. Luckily, it's only a fraction of drivers that do injure others due to phone use, but the same can be said for speeding etc. The idea is to try to prevent careless/dangerous driving that will predictably lead to a greater chance of a collision (NB not an accident as accidents are unavoidable and unpredictable).

> Are you ever worried about someone jacking the cameras if you have an accident?

Again, "accident" is better replaced with "collision" as "accident" implies that it's uncontrollable and "just one of those things", whereas the vast majority of collisions are due to driver behaviour such as lack of attention, speeding etc. (I tend to think of "accident" as something like a tree falling onto your vehicle). I've thought about what would happen if a driver did try to grab my cameras, but it would seem to be a very low probability event - I frequent https://road.cc and there's often rider submitted videos of terrible driving and there's very few where the driver has attempted to grab a camera and I can't think of any where they've been successful. I'm fairly tall and muscular, so I don't think I'd be an obvious target and I try to not react emotionally to close passes, though that does take some practise.

My wife had one incident where she was shouting at a driver that dangerously obstructed her on a roundabout (i.e. he pulled straight out ahead of her when she was already on it) and he ended up going all the way round the roundabout in order to follow her. She was turning left just afterwards and he deliberately tried to swing the front of his car at her, either to scare, intimidate or injure her just after the corner - she shouted something like "it's on camera, b*ch" as she has trouble with emotional regulation. He then went ahead and pulled into a side road and exited his car, so he might have been about to assault her, but luckily her journey was about 50m further along at her mum's house, so she didn't find out. The police took her report and video seriously.