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news
Cyclist in London on the phone - copyright Simon MacMichaelCyclist in Australia slapped with $1,161 fine for using phone while riding, as police “remind cyclists that they are subject to the same rules as motorists”
A cyclist in Australia was slapped with a hefty, four-digit fine this week after he was spotted using his mobile phone while riding, half an hour after another cyclist was stopped by police for riding through a red light – two incidents which prompted local police to remind cyclists that they are “subject to the same rules as motorists”.
On Tuesday, a 22-year-old man was handed a $1,161 penalty (just over £600) for using a handheld phone while cycling on Grafton Street in Cairns, a city in the north of Queensland, just after 5pm, the Cairns Post reports.
The fine meted out to the cyclist in Cairns is similar to that handed to another Queensland-based cyclist in 2021, who was spotted talking on her mobile phone while riding.
According to the Queensland government’s ‘Bicycle roads rules and safety’, holding a mobile phone, either “in your hand or resting it on any part of your body”, when cycling is illegal. This applies even if the cyclist is stopped in traffic or if the phone is switched off.
When “safely stopped”, cyclists can use a phone to pay for goods or services, present a digital licence or document to police, or gain access to an area such as a car park.
“You are allowed hands-free use of a mobile phone, for example, in a cradle attached to the bike. Hands-free can include to accept a call, use navigation apps, or skip a song,” the rules say.
“You can use a phone hands-free if it’s in a pocket of your clothing or a pouch you’re wearing. You must not touch or look at the phone. It can only be operated using your voice.”
30 minutes before the phone-using cyclist was stopped on Tuesday, a 27-year-old man also received a $619 fine for cycling through a red light on Buchan Street.
In Queensland, cyclists can also be punished with the same fines as motorists for offences such as using phones or continuing through red lights, though they cannot – for obvious reasons – receive penalty points.
Following the fines, a spokesperson for Queensland Police said: “Police would like to remind cyclists that they are subject to the same rules as motorists when using roads and must adhere to all road signals.”
> “Why pick on a lone female cyclist?” Cyclist slapped with £100 fine – for riding on a cycle path
In the UK, where motorists are banned from using a handheld mobile phone as a communication device, punishable by a £200 fine and six penalty points, there is no specific offence related to using a mobile phone while cycling.
In April last year, transport minister Baroness Vere told the House of Lords that the government currently has no plans to introduce specific legislation banning cyclists and e-scooter riders from using mobile phones while riding, telling her fellow politicians that “it is really important that we do not demonise all cyclists”.
However, while the government shoes no signs of introducing a specific law to crack down on phone cyclists, using a phone while riding could still result in police fining a cyclist for careless cycling, which carries a maximum penalty of £1,000.
For instance, last November a cyclist in Aberdeen who complained to the police after he was mistakenly pulled over by an officer for “using a mobile phone” while riding on the road – when, in fact, the cyclist was attempting to save footage of a close pass from a lorry driver on his bike camera – was later told that, though there is no specific offence for using the electronic device while riding a bike, his actions could still be deemed “careless and inconsiderate”.
During the incident, after stopping the cyclist the officer erroneously argued that it was illegal to use a phone or electronic device while cycling, told the rider to “look it up”, said that he would have received a ticket – or been arrested or charged – had she not been on her own, and advised him that not wearing a helmet or hi-vis clothing could lead to him getting “killed or smushed”.
And in March, the Metropolitan Police apologised for any “stress and inconvenience” caused as it dropped a much-criticised attempt to prosecute a cyclist accused of “posing a danger to other road users” as he attempted to film a phone-using motorist – just one day before the cyclist was due to face trial for cycling without due care and attention.
56-year-old Dave Clifton was cycling on Pont Street in Belgravia, London on 22 August 2023 when he spotted a Range Rover using his mobile phone while driving in traffic in the opposite direction, before turning around to capture footage of the motorist’s phone use with his helmet camera.
However, after submitting the footage to the Met, Clifton was told by a member of the force’s traffic division that the police intended to criminally prosecute him for allegedly committing the offence of ‘riding a cycle on a road without due care and attention’ while attempting to film the Range Rover driver.
But in a letter sent seven months later, a senior manager at the Met said that while responses to footage of road traffic violations submitted to the police were “subjective” and based on the opinion of the officer reviewing the footage, the offence of cycling without due care was not met in this instance, and that the footage of the incident is now being used by the force for internal training purposes.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
Latest Comments
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It wouldn't work at all where wtjs lives...
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Bonsai samurai? Or is it just a case of "they seem to get smaller every year"?
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I thought students were supposed to be intelligent?
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32 comments
Even though this "law" is quite ridiculous, I would suggest a sense of proportionality be applied.
In the sense of the proportion of danger to other people based on the vehicle.
We all know that drivers of motor vehicles present a massively greater danger so presumably people would agree that the fines etc should be, in principle, proportional.
(In the Australian case, if it is AUD1000+ for a cyclist using a phone, and if it is say 10x more dangerous for driving phone use then drivers could pay AUD10,000... )
As a tangent, when it comes to "costs", when drivers complain we don't pay "road tax" (yes I know it doesn't exist...) then we could argue that if it was proportionally applied then drivers would pay massively more than us.
But then we could argue that the cost benefit of cycling is actually a net positive (ie we should get money BACK for cycling based on the economic benefits, less population, congestion, health, road damage etc).
If, for example a "road tax" was applied to all users then maybe, if cyclists were to pay say £10 a year, then based on the costs of road maintenance etc, drivers would pay multiple times that.
I would imagine that it could be far higher than current VED rates, which drivers would then baulk at.
The other issue with proportionality is on rate of offence being prosecuted;
I suspect it is similar to RLJ in the UK.
Last data I have fully available is 2016;
~5k RLJ prosecutions for cyclists;
~55k RLJ prosecutions for drivers;
So cyclists made up ~8-10% of prosecutions.
But in the same year cyclists caused ~1-2% of injuries resulting from RLJ; Basically directly proportional to number of miles ridden.
So despite regular claims about 'scofflaw cyclists' who can't be prosecuted due to not having licence plates, cyclists are prosecuted at a much higher rate than motorists relative to harm caused...
Because it is easy and relatively safe for officers to stop cyclists, while stopping drivers has to be done carefully because any collision is likely to be fatal...
If car=cyclist then why not cyclist=pedestrian and why not pedestrian=cat.
So dear police officer, if you see a cat near a phone, issue a £600 ticket.
PS, I have done many stupid things on a bicycle, and talking to a phone is so stupid that even not I have done it, but such fines are simply crazy for cyclists.
I can also confirm I have never phoned a cat while riding a bike
"It was in a holder - I was using it paws-free", claimed the cat.
Slightly off topic, but $1,161 and $619? WTF? Does anybody know why Australia's fines are not "round" numbers like they are in the rest of the world? The only reason I can think of is that the fines are set at a round number then adjusted periodically for inflation. Maybe that's it?
Another possibility is that fines are set as a percentage of the offender's income. No idea if that is the case for these fines, but does happen in the UK leading to similarly non-round numbers.
Maybe they follow D&D generation rules:
Fine for phone use - roll a d12 and a d8 and a d4 and multiply the result… That sort of thing.
Of note - phone use while cycling is illegal in NL also and people have been fined. Not surprising people do - if people will use phones while driving they'll do so on a bike. Perhaps moderated slightly by concern about falling off.
https://road.cc/content/news/police-850-fines-week-cyclists-using-mobile...
OTOH since there is more clear separation of modes there it's *slightly* safer (for eg. pedestrians).
"remind cyclists that they are “subject to the same rules as motorists”."
Are butter knife owners subject to the same rules as gun owners too?
Bit unfair on the chap in the headline photograph to use his image to illustrate an article on this issue, seeing as he is quite clearly safely at a standstill at the side of a cycle path and therefore, being in London, perfectly legal.
£1,800 for operating your bike computer, £2,400 for operating your pulsemeter and/or powermeter and £7,600 for shifting electronic gears (£1,400 EU surcharge + 20% VAT for 950% special EU hate fee if they're Campagnolo SPS; we really hate the EU here in Brexitland).
???
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Good.
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Same in UK, please.
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So it's £200 for drivers and £600 for cyclists?
Or you think 2T of metal is equivalent to 10kg of metal?
According to the article It's £200 in England and the equivalent of £600 in Queensland, this would apply to motorists and cyclists
A cyclist rides into Hirsute and says "It's OK, the bike only weighs only 10 kg". To which Hirsute replies "Right you are, old chap. When your skull smashed into mine it felt like rather more than that. But who am I to doubt your word?"
Then when a car ran into Hirsute he didn't say anything ever again.
Hirsute is absolutely correct. The same offence committed by vehicles of incomparable risk are not equivalent.
Proportionality.
It's not the weight / momentum so much as the kinetic energy - and generally motorists are equipped with a lot more and can boost that in a rather short distance. (Actually "its complicated" because the kinematics and going under a truck even at low speed can be sufficient for you - but it seems motor vehicles present a different order of danger.)
Also Not sure if there are studies on the relative consideration of risk by people cycling versus driving but it doesn't seem many drivers are suffering physical consequences from colliding with pedestrians. And the legal consequences seem to be both very variable and not infrequently minimal.
I'm not suggesting a car doesn't usually have a lot more kinetic energy (which is directly proportional to mass and to all intents and purposes to weight) and isn't arguably a lot more dangerous than a bike, but the comparison would have been a lot more realistic if it had read "2 tonnes versus 50-100 kg", IMHO. Ignoring the mass of the cyclist doesn't make much sense, since by the same principle a pedestrian would have a total mass of 0, which is clearly wrong.
... fair point, all-up weight. So it's bike + rider vs. car + driver + any passengers. I suspect the dynamics become important because in the bike collision the heavier element (cyclist) may not directly impact the pedestrian and also become detached and carry away some of the energy etc.
Also kinetic energy being proportional to the square of the speed... If both collisions occur at the same speed fair enough - but typically cars will be going faster than cyclists (city driving tends to be stop ... wait ... wait ... wait ... foot down, hit limit ... stop). Certainly accelerating faster than most of us - and E-cars are even zippier to get going...
Me plus bike at a typical speed about town (in fact, generous) of 14mph - 1.76kJ.
Me in car on my own - say an older Yaris (1110kg).
At same speed: 21.7kJ
At the common Edinburgh "street" limit (20mph): 44.4kJ
It goes up pretty quick!
I think the mass of the car can be treated as infinite, in the sense that the velocity of the car is not going to change much at all on impact. Fortunately cars are generally softer than walls, since, for the rest, being hit by one will be pretty similar to being hit by a wall. But most of the time the impact with car is not going to be the biggest problem anyway. What is critical is what the cyclist subsequently hits, or is hit by, or ends up under.
ACAB
Except the cost of a cyclist using their phone is to hit a pothole and lose their phone down a sewer drain while the other involves a two tonne weapon smashing into bystanders.
Yup. The only conceivable consequence of hitting a pothole one-handed whilst concentrating on everything but the road is that your phone will be lost. There is absolutely no possibilty of you or anyone else getting hurt.
The Australian police really hate cyclists it seems.
You'd think that a country that was formed on the basis of massively disproportionate punishments inflicted on vulnerable members of society would know better.
Seems to be quite the opposite and the police have been killing Aboriginal people in custody: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-68634074
I do wonder whether Queensland's police would have been as quick to enforce the letter of the law on a motorist doing the same thing? Everything that I've read about Australian police leads me to doubt it, even if "the same laws apply ".
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