No signal in your car

Paul Newman has been campaigning for the last few years in Jersey to get people to stop using their mobile phones while driving, something you’d think wouldn’t be too difficult given Jersey was one of the first places in Europe to ban the use of mobiles while driving.

He launched a major campaign with Jersey Telecom and Jersey Evening Post last year called Hands Off but it doesn’t seem to be working as people are still being arrested or charged for using their phone in the car.

Now he wants to take things to a whole new level by making it impossible to use a mobile phone while in a car. Which is a bit odd if you take into account the fact that people are still legally allowed to use a phone on hands free.

Paul is launching a campaign to make it a legal requirement that mobile signals be banned inside cars. It’s illegal to block mobile signals in Europe at the moment but he wants to have that law changed on Health and Safety grounds.

He told Channel Television that one of his ideas was to “block the signal to the car itself so you can’t receive the signal.” Not possible at the moment though, it’s illegal to block a mobile signal in Europe - he’s thought of that though.

“But there’s a complication in that there’s a thing called the wireless telegraphy act which prohibits the blocking of a radio signal. So I’m looking at challenging that in the European courts or maybe get a clause in it for Health and Safety reasons because people have been killed and injured in cars because of mobile phones in cars.”

I understand that he’s had a personal tradegy relating to cars and mobile phones, I understand how he might want it stopped but this would make life difficult in the future for all sorts of potential future devices that might feature in a modern car.

What happens if somebody develops an automatic alert system that uses mobile technology to call the emergency services or AA in the case of breakdown or accident - if a law was introduced to block all mobile signals in cars then this wouldn’t work.

What about people that HAVE to use a mobile (hands free of course) as part of their job - that would be banned as well so their job would be harder/impossible.

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