[pacificenigma]

I live in Sydney.

There were under 2 deaths per annum from mobile phone use in NSW according to Transport for NSW's own FAQ about this program [1].

With such a low attributed baseline for mobile phone implicated NSW driving deaths, it seems improbable that in the future there will be empirical evidence of improved safety outcomes due to this program.

An alternative for next-generation cameras would be focusing on the dozens of NSW pedestrian deaths every year [2] and in particular enforcement of the pedestrian right of way law [3].

As a frequent pedestrian I frequently encounter drivers unaware of (or ignoring) this right of way law. Camera enforcement would achieve a better ROI as the awareness campaign would motivate drivers to adopt a more charitable disposition toward all other types of road users (including cyclists) and help them understand a rule that is genuinely and widely misunderstood. It would also not require the same privacy intrusion as a camera engineered to photograph inside your car, and the empirical evidence would demonstrate fewer deaths (as drivers would be more aware of pedestrian's legal right to cross the road and would be more actively paying attention to this possibility).

[1] https://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/stayingsafe/mobileph... FAQ 14

[2] https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/newsroom-and-events/media-r...

[3] https://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/stayingsafe/pedestri...

[ACow_Adonis]

Did you really manage to find the citation for [1] (12 deaths, approx 200 injuries) without reading the next dot point under the same heading that noted that these figures are intrinsically underreported due to the difficulty of establishing conclusive evidentiary categorisation post-incident?

Presumably the acting hypotheses is also that a significant number of those incidents caused in [2] and the general phenomenon of [3] is exacerbated by mobile phone use.

[pacificenigma]

> without reading the next dot point under the same heading

I read the quote, but as it was on a government web page discussing additional enforcement, I gathered they would have provided the most significant statistic to illustrate the safety criticality of such additional enforcement.

This seemed reasonable given that more than five years ago the NSW Centre for Road Safety was publicly stating mobile phone deaths are one of the "top five" causes of fatalities on NSW roads [4]. As such they have been aware of this factor and collecting significant causality statistics about it for an extended period.

Despite this they do not provide mobile phone death factors at all in their interactive tool [5] or any public reports that I could locate. The only public NSW mobile phone traffic death statistic that I could find was cited at [1]. If the government had more persuasive statistics than [1] (which they really should have given over five years of public assertions about the existence of such statistics) then they would have no hesitation publishing them at [1] or [5] or elsewhere.

> a significant number of those incidents caused in [2] and the general phenomenon of [3] is exacerbated by mobile phone use

Perhaps this is the case, but official NSW data on pedestrian trauma [6] does not reflect any mobile phone factors. The same document reports hundreds of pedestrian fatalities involving vehicles though.

In conclusion NSW's readily accessible official statistics reflect an annualised 2 mobile phone traffic deaths versus 54 pedestrian deaths over the same period. My comment simply argued focusing on pedestrian deaths would have been a better initial use of automated enforcement (and more importantly the education campaign and road sharing messages around it).

[4] https://www.drive.com.au/motor-news/phone-use-overtakes-not-... [5] https://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/statistics/interacti... [6] https://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/downloads/trauma-tre...