You, the pope and the highway to heaven

Harriet Baskas Travel writer

In the 1970 song “Roadhouse Blues,” Jim Morrison and the Doors summed it up with one sentence: “Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.”

In 2007, it took the Pope Benedict XVI 58 pages to say pretty much the same thing.

It’s bad enough when a parent, in-law or friend starts bugging you about the way you drive. Now the pope is piping up as the all-knowing back-seat driver, full of advice on how we can all be well-mannered when out on the road.

What brought this on?

Maybe the pope was fretting about the kickoff of the peak summer driving season and the safety of the more than 4 million Americans who were about to hit the highways for July 4^th celebrations. Who can blame him? According to the folks at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, July 3^rd and 4^th is when U.S. highway fatalities traditionally peak. But because the holiday fell midweek this year and there are two July 4^th holiday weekends, those statistics may soar.

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Or maybe the pontiff was mulling over the annual highway death statistics. In 2005, for example, there were 43,000 traffic crash fatalities in the United States and more than 1.2 million road-related deaths worldwide.

Eyes on the road
Even more alarming is the fact that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) believes that 80 percent of all crashes and more than 60 percent of near-crashes in this country take place when a driver looks away from the road for a few seconds to — you guessed it — do something like talk on a cell phone, look around for their cell phone, check directions, send or read a text message, eat, yell at the kids in the back seat, apply make-up or attempt something totally unrelated to driving.

Maybe the pope was reading the recent poll that ranked Miami, New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C as the U.S. cities with the rudest drivers or perhaps he was just finally letting off some pent-up pontiff steam in reaction to the fact that on June 6, while the pope was out for a whirl in his white, convertible popemobile, an ill-mannered, uninvited pedestrian tried to jump aboard.

Whatever the reason, on June 16^th the Vatican issued the pope’s “Guidelines for Pastoral Care of the Road” and posted it on the Vatican’s hip and holy Web site. Yes, the Vatican has a Web site.

The guidelines mention biblical road trips taken by the apostles and those Mary and Joseph took before the birth of Jesus, and offer tips on how modern-day travelers might try to get along out on the highway. So far, most news outlets have focused on the handy “Drivers’ Ten Commandments” section. The clip-and-save-style list of rules kicks off with the all-purpose “You shall not kill” and continues on with straightforward tips much like those your grandma or the folks at the local AAA office would offer, including instructions to “charitably convince the young and not-so-young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so,” which I think translates to “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” and “Respect but don’t hesitate to verify thy father and mother’s driving ability.”

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