What don't you like about France (Tongue in cheek)

Saturday change over?

We’re lucky here in the north-west, I guess - empty roads and good drivers!

But this reinforces the point I have been making throughout this thread - that it is wrong to generalise one’s experience in one locality into a characterisation (one might say caricature) of ‘France’ or ‘French people’.

As to accident statistics - these record accidents - or possibly some accidents (depending on the methodology) - their relationship to standards of driving in general would have to be understood after adjustment for dozens of other factors - not least (I suspect) regional and urban/rural variations.

Very few accidents are accidents, there is usually some blame, hence the Uk definition of Road Traffic Collisions

Our changeovers are more Saturdays than other days - but we do short breaks starting on other days, and the journeys vary enormously - both day and night ferry crossings to Brittany and Normandy, some driving from Calais, etc, some from overnight or longer stays en route, and a few that have hired cars from the various airports.

OMG I went to Puglia last year and it was the first time I’d driven in Italy - quite terrifying!!

The French! tongue out of cheek.

Or possibly too many Englishmen? :face_with_monocle:(though I suspect that would be more the case in the UK) :wink:

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British people buying a Chateau, and then filming it :zzz:

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That’s funny, I’d like to film that!

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Guess you must mean Brittany in the North West.
Out biggest issue is being on a straight main road with a stop sign with right of way from a minor road so that traffic joins the road without having to stop or even look!

Yes I’ve come across this arrangement - I wonder if it’s a legacy of the old priorité à droite convention? Or traffic calming?

I’m in Brittany, by the way - but I wrote ‘north west’ because Peter had made similar points about the high standard of driving in Normandy. And of course every Breton knows that Loire-Atlantique also really belongs to Brittany…

Priorité à droite still exists in France and works very well :wink:

How about people in rhd cars and tourists who dawdle around as if they’re trying to kill time…! :rofl::rofl::rofl:

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'ere, I resemble that remark :+1: :grinning:

Peter, where I’m staying there are two donkeys doing that job!

I was appalled to see, at a restaurant which had a huge vehicle park to encourage trade with drivers of HGVs, cement mixers, car transporters etc, rows of carafes of red wine down the tables where these guys were eating.

At 2pm they all piled out, climbed into their trucks and drove off onto the country roads of rural Brittany.

Alcohol is sold in the a/route service shops …

India is bad but at least the traffic is so dense it only moves at the pace of a wandering cow.

Pakistan is terrible. Tongas [horse-drawn taxi] on the same dual carriageways as huge trucks, buses, pickups, motos, bicycles, pedestrians, camels. I’ve seen a tonga floored by a truck, horse down in the ‘fast lane’. Seen a camel, loping at a good speed, down the same dual carriageway in the direction of the Khyber Pass, followed some 1/4 mile behind by a small, very angry young boy.

Every day the newspaper would report a fatality on the Great Trunk Rd outside the old town of Peshawar, invariably on account of ‘an over-speedy pick-up.’

How I survived 9 months of riding around on a 1963 Triump Speed Twin - dusty road, no brakes - only Allah knows.

I saw a 2CV drive the wrong way round La Grande Place, Brussels. The Belgians are very poor drivers, as were the Israelis, in my time there in the 70’s

Italians seem intent on suicide and taking as many people with them as possible. It’s very frightening to be in a vehicle in Turkey.

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I have a right hand drive car and how about the idiots that refuse to stay behind me, when I am travelling at the speed limit and overtake on a bend or on the brow of a hill?

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I would prefer goats or sheep, donkeys are difficult to milk.

Pretty hairy still when I lived there in the late 80s, I was told by a Belgian colleague that there was no compulsory driving test until fairly recently, you just bought yourself a car and then off you went.

Jane, it is the Gallic motoring equivalent of their pre WW1 military watchword, “L’attaque! A l’outrance!”

Et ou est l’ambulance?