Something miraculous is happening in Italy - motorists are driving sensibly, reports Paddy Agnew in Rome
We were travelling down the Cassia Bis dual carriageway into Rome the other day when we noticed it. Mirabile dictu, traffic was proceeding in an orderly, steady fashion, with nearly every car obeying the speed limit.
What had happened? Was there a police car ahead? No, we were witnessing the first stages of a quiet revolution that is gripping Italy.
Until very recently, driving down the Cassia Bis felt a bit like being caught up in the rush for the first bend in a Formula 1 grand prix.
If you respected the 90 k.p.h. speed limit cars raced up behind you and started flashing lights. If you were foolhardy enough to sit out in the overtaking lane, even travelling at anything up to 40 k.p.h. faster than the speed limit, disgusted motorists would still flash lights, blow horns and eventually, in total exasperation, shoot past you, Schumacher-like, on the (illegal) inside lane.
All, it would seem, is now changed. Suddenly Italians are beginning to respect the Highway Code (Codice della Strada). People are not only observing the speed limit but also wearing seat belts. Once-regular sights, such as drivers reversing down the autostrada after missing their turn-off or screaming along the hard shoulder on their way to the office, are not quite so frequent this month.
So what has happened? Has a light from heaven suddenly shone on the Italian motorist on the way to Rome, Milan, Florence, Turin or wherever? Not quite.
More prosaically, the impulse for change owes more to human than divine intervention.
A new points system for driving licences, introduced by transport minister Pietro Lunardi in July, is responsible for a sea change in Italian driving habits that has already reduced the number of road deaths by three a day.
Alarmed by midsummer carnage last year, which saw 904 people lose their lives in car accidents in July and August 2002, the minister introduced a points system on the eve of the summerholiday season.
The system, familiar to Irish readers, is simple enough. Licence holders start off with 20 points. Each time they break the rules of the road they are docked between one and 10 points, depending on the gravity of the crime. When all 20 points have been used up you have to sit your driving test again.
Ten-point infringements include drunken driving, travelling around a bend on the wrong side of the road, reversing up an autostrada or main road and exceeding the speed limit by 40 k.p.h.
Five-point infringements include not wearing a safety belt, dangerous overtaking and failure to give way. The one-pointers include more bureaucratic crimes, such as not having your licence and car documents with you when stopped by police. An infringement such as using a mobile phone without a hands-free system or earphone earns four points.
Although the cynic might argue that nothing could change the lifetime habits of a nation brought up on crackly old black-and-white images of Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss storming up and down the peninsula in hot-rod Ferraris to win the infamous Mille Miglia road race (eventually abandoned in 1957 because it was simply too dangerous), the cynic might be wrong.
In a manner not dissimilar to the way Irish drivers have learned to order a taxi for the Friday-night drinking session, Italians appear to have taken the big-stick threat of the points system seriously.
Road deaths for July and August this year have fallen by approximately 30 per cent (from 904 to 698), and the numbers of injured (down 35 per cent) and accidents (down 22.7 per cent) have taken a dramatic turn for the better.
Boosted by the success, Lunardi is set to tackle another regular life-threatening menace on Italian roads: moped and scooter riders. Anyone who has walked or driven around an Italian city will be only too familiar with the cavalier, daredevil habits of young motorini riders, with their seemingly irresistible penchant for high-speed zigzagging in and out of traffic, not to mention their ability to overtake on both sides. Likewise, anyone who drives every day on Italian roads knows that one comes across the sight of a fallen (and often sickeningly still) moped rider all too frequently.
Given the traffic-jammed nature of most Italian cities, the motorino has always been highly popular with commuters and teenagers (you need only be 14 to ride one).
As of July next year, moped riders will be required to have licences and they, too, will be subject to the points system, in order to curb a fatality rate that sees them (and motorcyclists) account for almost 50 per cent of Italian road deaths.
If Lunardi manages to get Italian drivers to stick to the speed limit and stop moped drivers from exhibiting their kamikaze tendencies, he will have pulled off the biggest revolution in these parts since Galileo Galilei deemed the world to be round and not flat.
What is more to the point, he may well have pulled off the biggest success story of the current centre-right government, led by the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.