A two-week trial of AI-powered road safety cameras in the West Midlands has flagged 1920 potential mobile phone offences – evidence that will come as little surprise to motorcyclists.
The trial, run in March at two sites in Birmingham and Wolverhampton, used AI camera technology to scan passing traffic outside Ladywood and Fallings Park fire stations. Initial image scans found 1163 potential mobile phone offences at Ladywood and a further 757 at Fallings Park – a combined 1920 potential phone offences across both sites in just two weeks.
No prosecutions followed. The trial, funded by the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) alongside the police and fire services, was designed purely to establish the scale of the problem rather than to catch and fine individual drivers. The technology’s accuracy was checked by human operators reviewing a sample of 8024 images.
Among the images released by the WMCA was a driver captured gripping a mobile phone with both hands, eyes fixed on the screen rather than the road ahead.
West Midlands Mayor Richard Parker called the findings “frankly shocking and far higher than we expected when setting up the trial,” adding: “The law is clear on seatbelts and mobile phones. I’ve met families who have lost loved ones to reckless driving. They never recover from these tragedies; the grief is always there. People need to stop doing this, it is simply not worth the risk.”
Simon Foster, West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner and chair of the region’s road safety partnership board, said the findings were “deeply concerning” and confirmed they’re now being used to evaluate how the AI technology might be deployed for future enforcement.
Superintendent Keeley Bevington of the region’s roads policing unit added that mobile phone use is one of the “fatal 5” offences West Midlands Police focus on as part of its Vision Zero ambition to eliminate road deaths, describing it as “a distraction that contributes to road traffic collisions where people are killed or seriously injured.”
The detection of 1,920 potential mobile phone offences in just two weeks, at only two locations, adds hard data to something every motorcyclist already knows from bitter experience: distracted drivers are a genuine, everyday danger to riders.
According to the Department for Transport’s own 2025 motorcyclist casualty figures , reported by MCN in July, 386 motorcyclists were killed on Britain’s roads last year – a 14% increase on 2024 – with “ineffective observation” by either the driver or rider the most commonly recorded factor in fatal and serious collisions between a motorcycle and another vehicle.
Mobile phone use was linked to 32 deaths on UK roads in 2025 and we’ve all seen the scale at which it exists while filtering through traffic. Only around 2000 motorists a year in the West Midlands are fined and given penalty points for driving while using a mobile phone. Since this figure was roughly matched in just two weeks by this trial, it would indicate that the problem is far bigger than the existing prosecution numbers suggest.
Ben Clarke began riding (legally) at 21-years-old when he passed his direct access one month before shipping his Yamaha XT660 R to Miami and embarking on a 13,500-mile tour of the USA and Central America. He's worked at MCN for the last six years, riding everything from super nakeds and superbikes to small-capacity electrics and scooters across several continents. In more recent years, he's worked…