For once Italy is about to introduce a law on which there is an all-party consensus - Northern League Senator Piergiorgio Stiffoni has proposed an amendment to a law reforming the highway code under which smoking while driving will become illegal.
Findings published by Sitab [the Italian Tobacology Society] show that it takes nearly five seconds to light a cigarette as opposed to two to answer a mobile phone call.
Add to this the seconds needed to pull the cigarette out of the packet, use the ashtray or flick ash out of the window and you have a potentially fatal instance of driver distraction, states Senator Stiffoni. Smoke, he adds, can also blur driver vision and is a health risk to everyone in the car, especially children.
For these reasons his amendment puts forward a 250-euro fine plus a loss of five licence points for drivers caught smoking. The points penalty will be doubled if there are children in the car. “With the windows wound up, the car becomes a gas chamber”, says the Senator.
The proposal has been welcomed by driving associations, for road accidents in Italy lead to more fatalities than in any other European country.
In 2008 over 40,000 accidents were caused by driver distraction on Italy’s roads and 15% of these were directly due to smoking. Under highway code reform the alcohol limit is to be reduced to zero for newly qualified drivers and the Northern League wants causing death whilst driving under the influence of alcohol to be treated as murder.
Do you agree with the Northern League’s proposals on smoking whilst driving?
Do you agree that causing death whilst driving under the influence of alcohol is murder?
