Coz more and more are driving automatics. Not a hope in hell of getting auto drivers to engage neutral and pull on the handbrake (myself included!) at a traffic light or roundabout or junction....
Those drivers, for the most part, wouldn't have bothered doing so in a manual either.
Edit. Apologies for going off topic to a degree, the point I was making is holding the vehicle stationary on hot brakes using the pedal is one of the mechanisms by which discs can warp.
A friend of mine was a service manager for a large Honda dealership in MK, land of rhe roundabouts. He had a visit from the technical boys from the importer who were wanting to know why there were so many warranty claims for warped discs.
He took them out and gave the car a good caning to get the brakes hot - he was was an amateur rally driver so had no problems warming things up - then drove back across town briskly while being sure to hold the car stationary with the pedal at every roundabout. Sure enough, a good judder had set in before they were back home.
Holding hot pads, which are being kept hot by the relatively dense mass of metal in the caliper, against the disc prevents the disc from cooling as quickly as it otherwise might. That fraction of a mm gap when the pedal is released is sufficient to prevent conductive heat transfer and holding the pedal down closes it tight. The rest of the disc is exposed to the air and cools, and thus contracts, more rapidly. Obviously, if one part of a surface contracts more quickly than another then the material is liable to derform, and once the warping has begun the effect becomes cumumlative.
I don't think it's liable to be an issue for the typical fairly average driver, but those who drive hard and habitually ignore the handbrake or do a lot or urban work getting up to speed and then braking again (cabbies) tend to be the ones that suffer.
When I learned to drive in the early 80's my instructor would smack me across the back of the Knuckles with a steel rule if I held the foot brake for more than a count of three, and you soon bloody well learned not to do it. These days the typical driving instructor is no better a driver than the average driver, and just so happens to be someone with a driving teaching qualification, nothing more. Anticipate if you're "slowing to go" or "slowing to stop" and use the handbrake accordingly.
A secondary issue is one of not being in full control (in the physical sense, not the roat traffic act sense.) The vehicle has no forward motion and as you lift your foot of the brake for that moment you have no motion and no control of the brake or accelerator, which is never a desirable state of affairs. A driver should have positive control over the vehicles state at all times, and that's why you'd fail your driving test for doing it.
