On The Road in France

Staying Alive: Don't Do As the Natives Do

Since you will be in a certain proximity to this particular style of driving if you are going to be on the road, a few elementary explanations and tips may be useful - in enabling you to return home in one piece - as well as having a fairly relaxed time while you are behind the wheel.

The most elementary thing about any movement, is stopping. Stop signs are relatively new in France and have not been translated into Gallic yet, so they are simply your common ordinary red stop sign with the legend, in capital letters, saying 'STOP.' French drivers translate this to mean, slow down a bit and look around, before flooring it again. You, on the other hand can safely stop at a stop sign. It is unlikely that you will get rear-ended, because insurance companies react to this in a mean fashion; but are as indifferent to stop signs as everybody else.

A fairly new sign, introduced about 15-20 years ago, is the international sign for 'yield.' The French reasoning about this sign is something like this: if stop means slowing down and looking around a bit, then the yield sign - is some sort of unknown street decor. So, under many yield signs you will see a rectangular white sign that says, "Vous N'Avez Pas la Priorite." This is quite a bit to read if you are hitting the intersection at 80 kph, but it means, "You Don't Have the Right-of-Way." Normally, in France, everything coming from the right has the right-of-way.

Now, at a round-about, where traffic circulates counter-clockwise, everybody 'in' has right-of-way and everybody 'out' doesn't. In France it used to be the other way around.

If you feel like rolling into an empty round-about at 80 kph you have the right-of-way. Do not insist on it. French drivers, faced with the yield sign on entry to the round-about, may react to it in ways you are not expecting.

This is true on the autoroute as well. If you are on the autoroute, you have right-of-way; everybody wishing to enter faces a yield sign. However, few French on-ramps offer much view to the left-rear - so oncoming comes on. In practice, you can slow down so the oncoming car fits in, or you switch left to a faster lane.

For some reason, in a country with so much land, many autoroute on-ramps are immediately followed by the exit ramp. It means that drivers coming on, perhaps looking to the left-rear, might not notice you trying to cut across - in front of them - to the exit. I call it the 'criss-cross dodg'ems.' The only advice I can give about this situation is crossing your fingers, keeping your left eye glued to the exit, and, if possible, your right eye focused to your right-rear. Got it?

After the autoroutes, which are toll-roads by the way, the next lower category of thoroughfare are the 'Routes Nationales.' These are what the autoroutes replaced.

Route Nationals are fast roads through the country. They are not limited-access roads, and their characteristics change continually. Sometimes four lanes, sometimes two, and sometimes three lanes.

Three-lane Routes Nationals require an extra bit of concentration. If they are straight and flat, the middle lane is for passing - regardless of which direction you are going. The rule seems to be a fairly common sense one. If you are in the middle lane, you are not supposed to have a head-on collision with anything coming in the opposite direction in the same lane. Neither vehicle has precedence.

The tricky part of this calculation, is to figure out when to pull back into the curb lane. You are going, say 110 kph; and the oncoming car is travelling at 120 kph. How much space is being eaten up how fast here? Is there in fact room to pull back into the curb lane? If this kind of mental activity is not your idea of a holiday, do not use the middle lane.

In hilly country, the middle lane becomes more useful, because it is usually offset to two lanes uphill, one lane downhill. Since you can also legally overtake going downhill, you can see further and you have gravity as an advantage. So, if there is a lot of truck and caravan traffic on a hilly Route Nationale, you can often make quite good time.

Lesser roads, like the 'departementales,' are mostly good old two-laned blacktop. Before you enter a town or village there will be a speed limit sign, which you should more or less respect, as there may be a gang of tractors lurking behind blind corners, or some other surprise.

In towns you should beware of France's newest craze: the speedbump. Since one of these costs far less than a traffic cop, with or without radar, they have spread throughout the land like a lumpy disease. They are not standard heights or widths. Since you are on holiday, no two speedbumps will be alike. Hit one too fast and you could destroy everything in your caravan.

On leaving town there will be a sign signalling the end of the speed zone, and you can proceed along at whatever you feel comfortable with. You can almost relax because there really is a lot of countryside in France and these roads aren't too bad and you can look around a bit.

Since there aren't many police patrolling the roads, and you may have forgotten the speed limit anyway, you can generally drive as fast as you feel like from one end of France to the other. However, do not expect any warning signs indicating that you should slow down or an extra sharp curve is coming up. The road engineers of France expect that drivers will be looking where they are going; so curves don't have any particular radius on lesser routes. Dangerously steep hills are usually signalled for the benefit of truck drivers.

Do not let yourself get annoyed if you get passed rather abruptly. There may be local traffic that wants to go faster than you do, and there will be a certain number of delivery vehicles that have big territories to cover. Give them room if you can and even waving as they pass is not out of order. On really hilly and narrow roads, larger trucks may 'wink' you by by signalling to the right. Signalling to the left means don't try it. But this 'winking' is not 100 percent certain and if you are in doubt, don't do it.

In any other situation, do not put too much credence in turn signals. Off, or course, means nothing. On, can mean anything, or nothing.

And everywhere, except on autoroutes, be ready. Anything may be on the road: pedestrians, animals, buses at busstops, tractors, bicyclists, wide loads, even houses, especially in towns and villages. They were there long before the road.

Another thing you may come across often in the road, are stopped cars. These are usually driven by people who are lost and the rule in France seems to be, when in doubt, stop immediately no matter where you happen to be.

One way of getting lost is to have a map. You are visiting France and you have this brand-new crinkly map. You see this trace, from here, wherever you are, to there, wherever you want to go. Joining the two places, with all the unfamiliar place names in between, is a road with a number on it. You think, aha, I will just follow this numbered road to where I want to go.

So you start off on the D189, for example, and you go along and admire France through the windscreen; pass through some little villages, and enter a little town. Somewhere in it there is a house in the road. You follow a caravan or a truck around the house and the next thing you see, sort of, is an intersection, with signs with names on them pointing north-east, east, south-west and there is... traffic... coming from every whichway, and the truck turns, obscuring the signs you didn't have time to read... and it is... confusing, but you keep rolling, now with doubt and the edge of town is coming up and you do not know where you are headed. Go back? Find a place to park and look at all the signs? Ah no. Just keep your eye open for the magic D.189.

You roll on. You go though some really small villages. Thirty kilometers later, you stop - in the middle of the road - and try to remember the name of the last village and find it on the map to have a reference, but you can't remember the name of the last village, nor the town where you got lost - if you are in fact, lost.

If you are in France, and you are not in too much of a hurry, you will see some places you didn't intend to. Take a good look. You may not be able to find them again even if you are looking for them.

And come back again. There are a lot of places in France to find by accident as well as intentionally.

Return to Richard Erickson's Paris Journal

Updated 07/95