Dangerous driving

@graham I’m not sure about ‘the roundabout thing is just french’ - bit harsh :wink: Regardless of ‘priority to the right’ rules, each roundabout in France has a sign placed before it telling approaching drivers that they do not have priority. As every ‘approaching’ driver soon turns into a roundabout user - they should know the rules. There are of course the obligatory exceptions (!) - a couple of notable roundabouts in Paris where priority is to those joining.

In my 12 years in France, I have always found merging from slip roads to be considerably ‘challenging’. I don’t care what happens in the UK - I don’t live there. Either, as described earlier, the car in front may come to a complete stop before joining or, those already on the road may not give way even though they have clear outside lanes. I guess that behaviour stems from the ‘give way’ slip road sign which in French psyche means those joining can just bloody wait!

For the last four years I’ve driven around 40 000 km per year and can thus, reliably inform you of the following motoring facts.

  1. All Audi drivers drive like tosspots.

  2. All male drivers of black Audis drive like uber-tosspots.

  3. If you see two guys in a clapped out BMW, they WILL overtake you, whatever the road conditions. It doesn’t matter if you are approaching a blind bend in a hailstorm with a side order of thick fog, it is their moral duty as virile men to overtake. This happened last week and ten minutes later I passed them parked at the side of the road, bonnet up and steam pouring out. Enough said.

  4. And it pains me to say this, but probably one of the worst group of offenders are women aged 35 - 55 driving Kugas, Dusters and the like. They are easily recognisable as will tear past you at 140 (way faster than their capabilities) and be doing at least any three (simultaneously) of the following - applying lipstick / chewing gum / smoking / shouting at their children / shouting at the phone.

And there you have it - my motoring facts for the day.

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Oh god yes Audi drivers, űbertosspots the lot of them (statistical evidence compiled by me) also it is obvious most voiture sans permis drivers had every reason to have their licences taken away and would be better off with a shopping trolley or a wheelbarrow and not on the road at all, ever. Then you have the people from 47 who can’t cope with our excellent roads in 24 and apparently enjoy being upside down in the vines near chez moi. Oh and cars registered 75 or 13 never respect priorités.

Re roundabouts: you know they are a ‘modern’ thing in France don’t you? When I was a child many many years ago admittedly, there weren’t any. We just had crossroads and zillions more fatal accidents. So you have lots of people who can’t cope…

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That is because everyone in the 47 is a pisshead. I know. I used to live there.

(Do you know, with the amount of ‘facts’ we can come up with, we could probably get a job in the campaign office at UKIP. Actually, hold that thought, we could probably run the show. There does seem to be a ‘vacancy’ after all…)

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We should go for it ! In the immortal words of mrs Doyle Oh gwan gwan you will you will

Well we couldn’t do any worse…!!

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The voitures sans permis needs scrapping. It might be a god idea to have them in an enclosed space, for leusure, like karting, or perhaps in an old folks retirement complex, but on the national roads, there is no place for them.

This adresses the law on drunk drivers being legally allowed to drive, because trust me, drunk drivers ARE dealt with severely here, suspension, and then when theyeventually get their licence back, they lose automatically six points, and have to go for a medical exam the following year to keep their licence before even starting to work on getting those six points back, and that’s actually more than is done about this disgusting problem in many other countries where we all hail from.

In saying that, here in the Alps, everyone seems to drive quite well, apart from tourist season when the regristration plates of the cars give away who the real pigs of the road are.
My only qualm is the education when it comes to using roundabouts. I passed a motorcycle licence here in France, and the code de la route, and it seemed pretty clear how and when to use indicators on roundabouts, yet in practice, nobody seems to have a clue. As a biker, this has caused me a lot of stress, but it’s about the only thing that bothers me on the roads, apart from the odd agressive driver, but they don’t necessarily have to be local, or even French.

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Apart from people who have had their licences removed the other vsp drivers are often old women who never got a driving licence at all and now live alone (widowed etc.) and have to be able to go shopping and get around if they want to retain any independence.
Younger people seem to know about roundabouts, even if they sometimes behave like twats, the people who cut me up all seem to be at least my age, ie old, driving cars whose power seems to surprise them.
I have 8 roundabouts on one of my 3 possible routes to work, there is always at least one near miss every time I take it.

@vero
If there is only one near miss in your route of 8 roundabouts, you are not using them correctly :blush:

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Just to back up my BMW theory, yesterday I was overtaken on a bend (unbroken line of course) by some loon in an elderly BMW. But it was a convertible so of course he HAD to do it. :slight_smile:

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Just got home. 350 km in Germany and Belgium on Thursday, 180 in Northern France yesterday and 500 this afternoon. No notable incidents at all, just thousands of drivers getting on with driving safely with due regard for other road users.

So funny !! :thinking:

Why? A perfectly normal journey. I’m obviously not hyper stressed like you must be behind the wheel. How sad.

To comment on Paul Lewis’ rant about French driving standards: French TV has regular road safety adverts, which do show just how concerned the Government is about safety and personal responsibility. One comment, I do agree about tailgating, it is very irritating indeed, though I have not yet had any contacts in the rear to date! One warning, if you are coming up to a roundabout with two lanes on the approach, do take great care that no driver undertakes you in the left lane just as you enter the roundabout. I find that I tend to swing into the left lane, just as a car is coming up alongside on my left. So do look in your left mirror as you enter the roundabout! As for speed cameras, they DO exist, as I know to my cost, twice. The french, on the whole, do not take very kindly to speed cameras, and one hears of them being uprooted or otherwise abused by various miscreants. To go off-course a bit, it makes my blood boil when I hear of French dockers holding British ferries to ransom to further their own ends. This to my mind is thoroughly selfish in the worst possible way. There seems to be strikes almost every day in France, at the drop of a hat. Never mind the general public!! Why has the Government not properly settled the air traffic controllers gripes? France is teetering on becoming ungovernable, it would seem…All for One, and One for All! Lack of DISCIPLINE! Lack of concern for OTHER people, rather than Moi,Moi, Moi!

Richard.longridge@sfr.fr

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Speed cameras being vandalised is considered a sport here in the deep South!

The thing is - lots of them are installed at the side of roads - body height. So when a ‘speeder’ is flashed and receives a ticket, s/he pops along and spray paints it. It normally takes 2-3 weeks for the camera to be cleaned up and put back into service - I guess it could be considered a job creation scheme (another one!).

As for strikes @longridge - that’s a whole different topic - a long one…

Latest stats out a couple of days ago don’t make particularly positive reading so far as road safety in France goes. It would appear things have been getting gradullay worse over the last 3 years. Anyway - at least they are determined to implement measures agreed in 2015!!

SECURITÉ ROUTIÈRE L’Office national interministériel de la sécurité routière (ONISR) a annoncé, vendredi, que le nombre de tués sur les routes françaises avait bondi de 30,4 % en septembre. 335 personnes ont perdu la vie, soit 78 de plus qu’en septembre 2015. Des chiffres qui mettent un terme à la tendance à la baisse amorcée entre juin et août. Selon l’ONISR, « cette hausse de la mortalité routière est à mettre en regard de la comparaison statistique avec un mois de septembre 2015 exceptionnel, qui avait connu une baisse très forte du nombre de personnes tuées sur les routes (- 17,4 %, NDLR), en partie en raison de conditions météorologiques très défavorables, marquées par de fortes pluies et inondations » qui limitent les déplacements. Seul point positif, le nombre d’accidents corporels a diminué de 1,2 %, et le nombre de blessés a baissé de 3,4 %.
Cette progression fait craindre une troisième année consécutive d’augmentation. Après douze années de baisse, la France a vu repartir à la hausse le nombre de victimes de la route. 3 384 personnes sont mortes en 2014 (+ 3,5 % par rapport à 2013) et 3 464 en 2015 (+ 2,4 % par rapport à 2014). Depuis trente-cinq ans, la France n’avait jamais enregistré deux années consécutives de hausse de la mortalité. La Sécurité routière a souligné la « détermination du gouvernement à mettre en œuvre l’ensemble des mesures décidées en 2015, notamment celles prises par le comité interministériel de sécurité routière » d’octobre 2015, « dont onze mesures seront examinées la semaine prochaine à l’Assemblée nationale dans le cadre du projet de loi de modernisation de la justice du XXIe siècle ».

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Driving is considered a freedom by us, dear french people. Remember french people don’t like rules, I am sure you already experienced it right ? :smiley:

So every time there is a politician threatening to do some speed repression, wooha ! The whole country gets on strike. Because they like driving, they like thinking that driving is hard and that playing with the manual gearbox is only reserved to the top best sundays pilots.

When I talk about it with my french friends, they all complain about the speed limit, that “ziss is an insult to our freedom”. French like their driving.

Now things are changing, because we still have between 3000 and 5000 persons killed on the road every year. And speed cameras bring a lot of cash to the french government, so they are going to spread it everywhere in the near future. And it is going to bring a lot of cash. Maybe taxes will go down lol !

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Here we are in 2023 ans I replied on comments on Frenh driving… just to keep you updated, it is just as bad as it was in 2016. Just drive for yourself and let the idiots that pass you on bends, with traffic coming towards you take the appropriate hits… You cannot complain to anyone… its not worth getting stressed about. Just drive as comfortably as you can.

It must be a regional thing, we haven’t come across this and we live in the countryside with loads of B roads in 72, they can be accused of dithering at junctions and roundabouts can be a lottery at times, but dangerous driving we rarely get.

It’s the same for me in 86. Tailgating is the only thing that I regularly come across, and I generally slow down where conditions allow so that the tailgater overtakes me.

The odd thing is that having overtaken, they usually proceed at a speed lower than I was doing while they were tailgating. I really don’t understand that…

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