The road signs that teach travellers about France
bbc.com
bbc.com
I really love these random stops.
These ones with more detailed drawings are less common, but I've also seen them in multiple countries (at least my home town in Italy and some cities in Hungary have them).
Aren't the parking spaces required by law, instead of "because we're rich"? I don't know, but I just watched the latest Not Just Bikes video, where he mentions legal requirements for stores to provide lots of parking spaces, which makes everything more expensive.
However, the point was about the signs. You can find quite a lot of neat little things that you otherwise would have no easy way of discovering.
Texas has a bunch of state historical markers along even minor routes. They can be hard to catch at speed (most TX highways have a 70 MPH speed limit, even small ones), but there's typically a space where you can pull over and read it.
The extensive network of well-signposted trails and so on that I’m now used to were not a common feature of my life there. For what it’s worth, I did have experiences there that one doesn’t routinely have here that were nonetheless an educational part of my life.
That wasn't my experience in California and Nevada as a tourist from Europe.
If you’ve ever taken the A10 motorway France between Bordeaux and Paris, it’s about a 500 km stretch that is fairly straight and, thus, a bit boring. But seeing these golden signs along the road was always a small event for me as a kid. They act as sporadic milestones: every time you see one, you know you’ve made progress and entered a new region.
I'm British-Canadian so the European roads hold no fear for me. I'd say to any worried North Americans (roundabouts, kms, aires), just do it some time - France in particular is a chilled place to drive motorhomes (RVs if you must) and I've never had any grief. We avoid Paris and other dense urban areas, but the beautiful countryside and easy autoroutes make for an excellent tour. We're off to Norway next month and I hope the signage is as interesting.
These are cool indeed.
I think their placement is weird though. They really don’t tell you how to get there. Sometimes they are very far from the thing they advertise. And you really shouldn’t go off the motorway when you see the sign. It could be quite confusing when you actually are planning to go to that place.
Also a bunch of places that are shown in the sign are privately owned like zoos and recreation parks. These tend to be iconic ones but it still feels a little off.
Still, it is possible France came up with them first.
That's French, and Italian, roadsigns in general.
We had to slow down to 80mph in France.
Sounds like they're talking about the fact that at an intersection, unless signaled otherwise, the people coming from the right have right of way.
It is common courtesy to move over or match speed so they can merge more easily, but that's not the law.
High speed driving requires looking far ahead to anticipate lane changes of other drivers.
Yeah but they don't; priority to the right never happens on motorways, all insertions lanes have “Cédez le passage” signs.
I see from checking Google Maps that, indeed, the merging lanes all have a yield sign in them (from the handful I checked). Now I'm wondering "do they have the sign because otherwise the merging vehicle WOULD have the right of way?" or "is this just a friendly reminder of what would legally be the case even if the sign wasn't there?"
(edit: I seem to have found the relevant regulations at https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT0000... , article R415-8 seems to cover it)
You were probably victim of a French person using their priority correctly, which is very misleading because you would have been found full-guilty. I call it an “implicit priority to the right” and municipalities use it abundantly to create slow traffic, but foreigners don’t always know that smaller innocent secondary streets can have priority OVER the main road of a village.
Particularly in small hamlets, where there is a stone cottage on the corner, there is no visibility of incoming traffic. MOST of the little streets will have a stop/give way, but you can't be sure. It's like playing Russian roulette.
Just terrible road design because of an ancient rule from the horse and carriage era.
Worse: It is inconsistent. My father was rolling out from a neighborhood from the right, hit a car: He didn’t have the right of way because the “cadastre” (the registry of ownership maps) said the land belonged to the neighborhood and therefore was private property. But in MY neighborhood, the neighborhood land belongs to the city and it would have given him priority.
I think as a country becomes more international, there are fewer unintuitive rules and more explicit markings required for everyone. That France didn’t change that is a mark of cute traditionalism.
EDIT: https://youtube.com/shorts/Fs8h9SRqJ5I?si=eZNm9p5HirXkknmU
I thought you were talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OGvj7GZSIo
So if it's an actual roundabout (aka, "rond-point"), then normal traffic rules apply for intersections: Priority to the Right. Vehicles already on the roundabout must yield to cars entering it.
Often, you have what is referred as "Carrefours à sens giratoire", which can very much look like "rond-points", but priority is to the vehicles already on the roundabout. For this reason, there will be a yield sign at the entrance of the roundabout to make it clear there's a special rule that applies to it. Sometimes you have traffic lights as well.
Even with one lane intersections North America usually uses "all stop" if there's any amount of traffic to regulate the flow.
I just hate multi-lane roundabouts in general but the French ones I dislike even more. There's a lot more that you need to keep track of, the traffic in the roundabout and the traffic that wants to enter.
Yeah but that's theory and theory only.
I would say that 99.9% of anything that look like a roundabout is a "normal roundabout" where the priority is for people in the center, not for the ones entering. This is currently the same than the rest of Europe.
Place de l'étoile is an exception, not a rule and the total number of roundabout like that in the country can probably be counted on one hand.
Most probably not. I know 3 of them off the top of my head in my neck of the woods. They are not super common, but they are not that rare either.
Actually it's pretty consistent all across Europe. Almost everywhere, every entrance to the roundabout has the yield sign [1]. Without the yield sign, every incoming traffic is right hand traffic and those already on the roundabout have to give a way.
Now the trick is that yield signs at the entrance are so common that drivers assume they are always there.
They've been super rare since the early 2000's though.
There always a reason for the absence of the yield sign: curvy surface or tram crissing.
The answer is, it depends, pay attention to the signs! Most of the time it’s the car on the roundabout, but not always.