"It's only at the lights"

A lot of readers will have got this far thinking, fair enough, but I don't do it on the move. I do it at the lights. The car's stopped. Nothing can happen while the car's stopped. Whatever the studies say about glances at fifty, they can't be about a car with its handbrake on.

Two things. The first is that the law doesn't share the belief. GOV.UK is specific that the offence still applies when you're stopped at traffic lights or queuing in traffic, and in a car that switches its engine off when it stops. Six points at a red light, same as at sixty. That's stated once here and once in chapter 15.

The second is what a peek at the lights actually looks like from outside, and you can check this at the next set. It doesn't start and finish with the car stopped. It starts stopped and finishes moving, because the light changes on its own time and not when you've reached the end of the message. The car in front moves and your foot comes off the brake while your thumb finishes the word, and for the first fifty metres, at ten and then fifteen miles an hour, you're a person looking up between words. That's not a stationary peek. That's a moving one with a stationary start.

And then there's the putting down. Thomas Dingus and colleagues, in the biggest naturalistic study there is, with cameras in the cars of more than three and a half thousand drivers over three years, found that reaching for a handheld phone carried nearly five times the crash risk of ordinary driving. Not using it. Reaching. Which is what happens when the light changes and the phone's in your hand and it needs to go somewhere.

There's also the queue. The lights are one thing, but the belief extends to any time the car's slow, the queue on the ring road, the crawl past the roadworks, where stopped and moving alternate every few seconds and the peek has no clear place to end. Ask yourself what speed you were doing when you finished the last message you read in a queue. I don't think it was nought.

The lights are where the habit lives, and it's the part of the habit that feels most innocent. It's also the part the police can see most easily, the part the law is clearest on, and the part that most reliably turns into a moving peek without a decision. If the rule in chapter 21 only covered the moving car, this is where it would leak.