Driving in France
The 70’s are known for many things that we are better off without: gas lines, disco, and student protests. While I was a student at UCLA, I took advantage of the political ferment and helped get rid of the foreign language requirement because I didn’t want to take another French class. Ten years later I was back in class in preparation for being transferred to Paris. Oops!
It was going to be a two-year assignment so after I found an apartment, I decided to buy a car. One can get by in Paris, as in Manhattan, perfectly well without a car, but that would leave me or any other native Southern Californian feeling like a prisoner on weekends. For the first year you are there, a foreign driving license and passport are sufficient.
France has highly trained bureaucrats that are sure they know best. A study once showed that yellow headlights work better in fog, so all cars sold in France are required to have yellow headlamps. If you know this and are ever visiting France, you can amaze your travelling companions by pointing out, at night, the cars that have foreign country stickers on the back before they drive past.
French drivers flash their headlights to say, “Get out of my way!” The custom in neighboring England is just the opposite, where a blink means that they will let the other car go ahead. No wonder the French accident rate is higher than ours and there is deep-seated distrust between those two countries.
After the Eiffel tower and the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe is probably Paris’ next best known landmark. It sits in the middle of the mother of all traffic circles with 12 major avenues coming into it. This forms the biggest challenge to driving is Paris, called L’Etoile, meaning the star. Stopping tour buses, crammed with photo snapping tourists, can clog it. Where we lived, it was on our route to anything that was south or west. The rule for driving it was simple; cars on the inside have the right of way. The trick is not lose count as to which avenue to get out at, as the buildings at each corner look alike. It is no place for the faint of heart, or to be tentative. For drivers that chicken out and lose their nerve, the alternative is waiting at a series of stoplights with long reds and short greens to cross each avenue on a ring of side streets.
Outside of Paris, there are autoroutes, which are like our interstates, except they are mostly toll roads, and national routes which are like more like our highways. Speed limits are of course in kilometers per hour, 50 in town (about 30 mph), 80 (about 50) in the country lanes or on freeways in cities, 110 (about 70) on the national routes and 130 (about 80) on the autoroutes. In adjacent Germany, their rural autobahn have no speed limits, but most people drive at about 85 mph, and few go over 100. In France, like here, there are a fair number of speeders, so I am not sure that the Germans actually drive any faster than the French.
French law mandates 5 weeks of vacation for all employees, but as their incomes average a bit less that ours, they have trouble affording that. Their adaptation to this circumstance is to take off a whole month at once, as vacation rentals are cheaper by the month. First choice is the month of August, when maybe 60% of Paris is away. The routes south at the beginning of the month are bad, but the routes leading back into Paris at the end of the month are impossible. Seventy mile-long traffic jams on the autoroutes are an annual occurrence.
But as the autoroutes don’t go everywhere, the national routes must serve. Although they are widening and upgrading many of them, the typical national route was laid out between the World Wars, and consists of three lanes between evenly spaced rows of trees that give a stately effect. The three lanes are allocated as one lane for each direction and a shared passing lane. Some highways in the US had this arrangement, but for safety reasons, the middle lane is now allocated alternatively as passing lane for one side or the other.
Being passed is an insult to a Frenchman’s car, if not his virility. Thus a frequent reaction to when someone attempts to pass is to speed up. Trying to pass someone and failing is akin to admitting impotence. With this in mind consider the following situation.
On occasion, a driver coming up really fast will find himself behind a car already being passed. Rather than slow down and pass both cars when the slowest car has been passed, he will be tempted to use the extreme left-hand lane to pass both cars at the same time. If you happen to be driving the other way on that national route at that time, what do you do besides brake and pray? You are hemmed in by the trees and face oncoming traffic with franticly flashing headlights in all lanes. Of course, the other drivers shouldn’t have started their passing maneuvers if the road was not clear, but the tendency of the passee to speed up drags out the process. The driver using your lane is clearly in the wrong, but what is the satisfaction of being dead right?
Even worse is if you encounter an oncoming trio when you are about to be passed, so there are five cars that have to get through three lanes. I don’t even want to think about what would happen if a pair of trios encountered each other. One hears stories about such an occurrence, but perhaps it is just a modern legend.
I don’t want to give you the wrong idea about driving in France. I survived three years without an accident. I never got around to getting my French driving license, which actually worked in my favor, as the one time I got pulled over for speeding (I didn’t notice that I was inside a town limit so I was still going 80 kph) they let me off with a warning. I hear Portugal is much much worse. In only two years in Singapore, my car was hit three times, but that is another story.