Poles Fume at Plan to Ban Drivers From Lighting Up

WARSAW — The burning question on Poland’s jammed roads and highways sounds a lot like a late-night television joke: Can a Polish motorist smoke and drive at the same time?

The punch line? Ask several hundred Polish lawmakers and you still won’t know for sure.

The Polish Senate on Friday took up the incendiary matter of smoking and driving in the country’s largely unnavigable cities and headed on a collision course with the Parliament’s lower house, the Sejm.

Proposed legislation would make Poland the first country in Europe--and perhaps the world--to ban smoking while driving in populated areas.

The prohibition, adopted by the Sejm, is rooted in the simple truth that Poland’s numerous first-time drivers are a public menace who desperately need both hands on the wheel.

“Having cars is so new to so many of us that we really have a very low driving culture,” said Katarzyna Oldakowska of the Capital Automobile Club, herself a self-described terrible driver. “No one knows how to behave on the road, whether you smoke or not.”

But some senators fear that the ban may only make things worse by depriving surly motorists of their nicotine fix when they need it most--while ensnared in traffic so maddening that even good drivers here in the Polish capital sometimes take to the sidewalks and oncoming lanes.

“Practically all of us have concluded it is more dangerous for everyone if there is an upset driver out there who can’t smoke his cigarettes,” said Sen. Adam Andrzej Daraz, who was among those lawmakers suggesting that the smoking rule be snuffed.

On Friday, the Senate obliged, voting to delete the prohibition from a far-reaching traffic bill. The legislation now goes back to the Sejm, where the author of the provision--insisting that it is needed more than ever--has pledged to fight for its reinstatement. Under Polish law, the more powerful lower house has final say on such matters.

“When I first suggested the idea, everyone screamed it was crazy and could never happen,” said Karol Dzialoszynski, who is a smoker. “But in the end, it passed by two votes. . . . We can try again.”

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Poland boasted the fastest-growing car market in Europe last year, as new registrations jumped 40%. The number of private cars on Polish roads has mushroomed by nearly 3 million since 1990; traffic congestion in Warsaw has already exceeded projections for 2010. To keep pace with the surge, the country needs 1,600 miles of new roads at a cost of $10 billion, the government estimates.

“Everyone wants to be seen in their car, and especially the new and fast ones,” Oldakowska said. “It doesn’t matter if you live just two tram stops from work. You are going to drive. It is a status thing.”

But the fad for cars has not meant a fad for good driving. The country has been so unprepared for the influx of automobiles and motoring newcomers that two-thirds of applicants fail the Polish driving exam on their first try.

Teaching standards are so lax that driving instructors routinely lack basic skills and knowledge. Two instructors in Siedlce, in eastern Poland, were fined for speeding on the job and barreling through a pedestrian crosswalk; three teachers in Szczecin, in the northwest, were discovered drunk on the job.

The new traffic law is intended to clear both the air and the roads. The 151-section document sets out a series of new rules, from a crackdown on fly-by-night driving schools (only a third of the 270 schools in Warsaw are expected to meet the new standards) to a central registry of licensed drivers (forged licenses are so readily available that they can be purchased at Warsaw’s main flea market).

“The Communist system never imagined that it would become the fashion for everyone to own a car,” said Andrzej Wierzbowski, an inspector for the greater Warsaw Transportation Department. “You used to wait years to even get a car.” The smoking rule was a late addition to the legislation, incorporated into a provision restricting use of cellular telephones, which lawmakers also deemed a driving hazard. The rule allows drivers to smoke only in uninhabited areas.

So far, legislators have steered clear of regulating other driving impediments, including the two-fisted hamburger; though McDonald’s has introduced drive-in service to Poland, most Poles still prefer to eat in the parking lot.

“It is all about being distracted while driving,” said Dzialoszynski, the member of Parliament who proposed the rule. “This was meant to start a discussion and make people think about how their behavior in the car affects their driving and can be harmful to others.”

With 10 million smokers in Poland, generating discussion has not been a problem.

A smokers’ rights group in the southern city of Krakow rushed off an open letter of protest to Parliament, suggesting that the logic behind the smoking rule, if applied to other areas, would bring automobile transportation to a standstill.

The group facetiously proposed extending the ban to prohibit driving in high-heeled shoes, applying lipstick, drinking coffee, fiddling with the radio and giving rides to good-looking passengers.

“One should also ban the shifting of gears because it leaves only one hand on the steering wheel,” the smokers complained.

Other unhappy commentators have suggested a prohibition on sneezing, citing the danger of closing one’s eyes while driving.

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The speaker of the Sejm, Jozef Zych, went so far as to playfully recommend a ban on physical contact between driver and passenger.

“As a young lawyer, I dealt with car accidents,” Zych said. “The first accident I handled happened because the driver was holding the knee of the woman seated next to him.”

But health officials have welcomed the unusual proposal, saying it is a symbolic breakthrough in the battle against both traffic deaths and lung cancer. Poland has one of the highest fatality rates from car accidents in Europe, as well as one of the heaviest smoking populations in the world.

“You must look at this from the Polish perspective,” said Witold Zatonski, head of the Health Promotion Foundation in Warsaw. “One in 10 people of middle age is dying because of a [car] accident or sudden external cause. When you think about it, there are many reasons to believe it is not the best idea to drive and smoke.”