If you drive a car, the chances are pretty much certain you've broken the law at some point.

There may be someone out there who’s never exceeded the speed limit or inadvertently gone out with a blown headlight, but I suspect it’s an exclusive club.

If we’re honest, most of us have crossed the law on the road. But how many of us felt remorse?

That’s the thing about most traffic offences - you don’t tend to feel bad about breaking some of the rules. Whizz down the M1 at 90mph and the chances are you won't get to the other end in a state of dreadful remorse. Unless, of course, you’re caught. No, the likelihood is any reflection will be restricted to thanking your luck. You broke the law, you didn’t get caught, and, when push comes to shove, you may well think you didn’t really do anything very wrong anyway. But there are exceptions.

Decades ago, drink-driving was seen as a reasonably victimless crime, carried out by people who’d gone to a dinner party, or had a night at the pub and just wanted to get home. Just like speeding, it was the sort of crime people knew was illegal - but just didn’t really feel was all that wrong.

It took many years to change attitudes, but it worked. These days, we don’t just frown upon drink-driving, but treat it with some level of contempt and we change our behaviour accordingly.

It’s now quite normal for someone to be the sober designated driver, or to stick to a pint of shandy in the pub. Nobody wants to be a drink-driver. So what about using your mobile phone while driving?

Who’s done that? Answer - probably most of us. I reckon a majority of drivers have looked at a text or picked up a phone to answer a call.

Certainly as I drive around, I often see drivers with a phone held to their ear, or looking down distractedly as they write a text. It is, palpably, dangerous, yet it doesn’t have the stigma drink-driving, or even reckless speed, attracts. I suspect that will change.

A senior police officer this week suggested two offences involving your mobile phone should lead to a driving ban, and I’ve heard various moving stories from families who have been left shattered after accidents involving drivers who were using their mobiles when they should have been concentrating on the road. And yes, I’m as guilty as anyone.

I know how beguiling it can be to have that phone sitting on the seat next to you, how easy it seems to pick it up and answer a call or reply to a text. These days, too, the phone is becoming the hub of all life, with its capacity to play you music and plot your route. It’s all too easy to think these devices have become so pervasive in our lives that we can assimilate them into our driving. But we’ve got ahead of ourselves.

The whole point of driving a car is to do everything possible to stay safe, whether that’s putting on a seat belt, or sticking to the rules of the road, or, perhaps most fundamentally, concentrating on what’s going on around us. And you can’t do that if you’re reading a text message about whether it should be chicken pie or fish and chips for dinner.

Many of us are still at a stage where we think looking at a phone is a victimless crime, just as my parents’ generation used to think drink-driving was just one of those things you did. And yet every week people are getting injured, and sometimes killed, on our roads because of drivers not concentrating. You can buy a hands-free kit for your car, or you can just ignore calls and texts until you get the chance to pull over. For thousands of years we coped without instant communication and it’s still the case very few things have to be dealt with instantly.

It is a question of two things. For one, can we get to a point where using the phone while driving is seen as socially unacceptable and two, can we retrain our brains to ignore the mobile for a while? Just for a while, but for enough time that we can drive safely, cutting the chance of killing ourselves, or someone else? Put like that, it seems a pretty good idea, no?