Never able to pay attention to them as I'm hyper alert to « CÉDEZ LE PASSAGE » signs, or the absence of one telling me I don't have to give way, which means I don't have priority, and some random local could barrel out at 90km/h.
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.
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)