Driving in France - Part VI

During driving school, I picked up the habit to over-zealously slow down to every street approaching my right. This is not a natural rhythm for us Americans. Not at all. Slowing down every time you see a street to your right is due to the rule of "priority to the right."

Ah, priority to the right. It has to be the most asinine driving rule ever created. This means you can be driving on a street, any street, and a car coming from a tiny road off to the right can cut you off even if you are going mind-blowing and legally obliterating speeds. You have to anticipate this street to the right and anticipate this car and let them cut you off or you are in the wrong.

The same goes for you if you want to turn right. If you don’t have a yield or stop sign, you can pretty much blindly turn right onto a major street with cars swooshing by and if they hit you, it’s their fault. Many times we’d come to a major street and I’d have “the right of way” and I would cautiously yield and get yelled at.

Boo Boo exasperated would scream,“What are you doing? Do you see a yield sign? No! You have right of way! Go, go, go!”

“But that guy is driving fast. He’s going to hit me!,” I’d plead.

“Let him hit you. Right of way! It’ll be his fault!,” Boo Boo would respond in an outrage.

To make things more complicated, there are millions of ways to express whether or not the priority to the right is in effect. There is the subtle “yield” sign or the white dashed line that you may or may not spy way off to the right that isn’t even meant for you. It’s meant to tell the cars on the little street that they have to yield. Interpretation: you on the big street have the right of way.

To see these signs, you need to strain your eyes and react appropriately before you pass the street. Do you slow down? Do you keep going? First, you need to see what the hell the car on the street to the right can or cannot do. And it’s very distracting to constantly be worrying about the guy on the fucking little street off to the right. Give him a stop sign and be done with it all.

Would you like to know more? Because there is more…There is the sign with the yellow square that means you have the right of way. Then just to mix things up, there is the gray square with a bar through it that means you no longer have the right of way. Clever, eh?

In the US, we’d be simple about it. We’d have a huge sign that says, “You have right of way” and another goddamn sign that says, “You no longer have right of way.” Right?

And, there is also the big black X that means for this specific upcoming street, you no longer have right of way, but at the intersection after this one, you might have the right of way again. Mind boggling, just mind boggling and oh, so French.