I drove up to Paris today. It’s about eight hours. My brother, at this time, is driving across the U.S. for his house move. It takes about 4 1/2 days, from what he mentioned.
Coming north, the road was largely dominated by Dutch, English, Belgians and Germans. Road rules in France are, one must stay to the right under threat of a fine, and only pass when necessary. That is, if it is possible to get over to the right, one should.
In the U.S., it might nominally be like that, but my observations are that the right lane on a highway is essentially reserved for people getting on or off, or speeding past (on the right!) all those folks plodding along in the middle or left-hand lane. Therefore, it’s not really all that rude for someone pushing the speed limit to travel all the time in the left lane.
It is a measure of my integration here that I now find travelers in the left lane to be poorly educated. Except the English, who might be excused. Though most of them hug the right, rather terrified of aggressive Latin driving styles, and often encumbered by caravans.
There was a striking number of bicycles being tugged against the wind from north to south and south to north, on the backs or tops of vehicles.
Bison Futé (the Clever Bison, I kid you not, a pseudo-Native American tracker) is the real-time national traffic reporting service for major holiday migrations. Today was a “red day in both the departure and arrival directions”. This presumes, rightly, that most of the frustrated drivers in cars are departing from or arriving in major urban centers. At the worst point of the day, there were more than 600 km worth of traffic jams. I personally spent 25 minutes getting through the toll merging from the A62 to the A20, and about the same getting around the towns of Montauban and Brive. But it could have been worse – there are a couple of black driving days as well.
See a real map since I can’t succeed in embedding it.
Bison Futé, according to French Wikipedia, was created in 1976 as a cartoon character logo on some 600,000 maps distributed that year to French drivers, indicating alternative roads for how to get from one attractive place to another. These maps were published every year by the (more boringly named) National Center for Road Information until 2003. Bison Futé, in his first incarnation, is now sort of moribund. The information about which highways are saturated is now disseminated on the Internet and by radio (since it’s not advisable to go web surfing with a gadget while driving a car in stop-and-go accordeon traffic).
Of course, while you are sitting in traffic, you can think about all those delightful parallels between blood- and traffic-flow, and wish you were a physicist to the extent that you had studied anything useful about turbulence. Then when you arrive, you can easily find that lots of folks have already thought about it, though the practical solutions for making smoother stents for cars and trunks, or for inciting drivers to erase slowdowns for the common good rather than for their immediate and personal gain, are few and far between.
I’d recommend in particular the “folks” link and discussions therein. But beware! Letting spaces open up beyond a certain threshold in front of your car in France is simply incentive for someone else to pass you and get back to the right again – in front of your car, this time. If they continue to move more quickly than you, it’s not a problem, but it’s wise not only to try to dampen traffic waves, but also not irritate the other drivers unduly…
We drove from Les Sables d’Olonne to Calais in a fairy breezy 6 or so hours last Saturday. Most of the jams seemed to be in the other direction fortunately though we did spend about 30 mins queuing for petrol at a service station that simply didn’t have the capacity for motorway traffic. Gaaah!
Very interesting links, Heather. I encountered a few of these “phantom accidents” on my way home after a holiday weekend (last weekend in fact).
Of course, most of my delay in getting home was caused by taking a back roads route at night and missing a turn – but no problems, and I enjoy tootling along routes I haven’t taken before.
And that French penchant for overtaking is well represented in La Belle Province (Quebec), I can assure you.
I honestly thought that passing on the right must be legal the first few times I was in the US…
Wow, that “erase slowdowns” link is amazing! I get so frustrated by those “waves” that happen for no apparent reason. If I’ve been sitting in barely-moving traffic for ages, I expect to see, well, something at the end of it to explain the slow-down. It’s immensely frustrating when the traffic just suddenly starts moving again and you realise that it was just bad driving habits that were slowing you down.
Not that I drive, but the vagaries of traffic flow are frustrating.
One odd thing to me is when everyone slows down to well below the speed limit to innocently pass a preoccupied police car.
When I needed to get my thesis printed, I spent three hours boxed in along the Seine between Bercy and the next bridge. By the time I got to it, of course the problem was long resolved. People were in such a siege mentality, they got out of their cars and lent one another their cell phones (this was 1999 when not everyone had one).
Driving up, I had the use of a car with cruise control. I witnessed firsthand Sabbi’s phenomenon (I’m going to name it after you!) at each marked radar control point – people slow to well below the limit. So I passed all of them quite nonchalantly.
Stephen – I pulled off at three gas stations before I found one with a reasonable number of cars in line (two or three is my maximum).
You know, it could be worse. The travel in China at their New Year has been likened to every single man, woman and child in the United States getting into a car and driving at the same time. Just imagine several hundred thousand extra automobiles on the road at once. And that’s just the people driving, let alone taking all other forms of transportation.
I was speaking with a Japanese co-worker this morning and she told me that in Japan, many (most? all?) people take the same couple of weeks in August off, resulting in horrendous line-ups at gas stations and unbelievable traffic congestion. Just imagine.