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Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, I've driven in 15 different European countries and found France to be one of the easiest and most chill. I mean, on the highways and city streets, anyways -- not so much on the farmland single-lane roads that shockingly have a speed limit of 90km/h lol ... but regardless, the "people merging in from the right have the right-of-way" actually makes sense to me since they're engaging in the most "high-pressure" action, while those of us strolling along on the highway can just adjust our speed to give them space, or change lanes ahead of time as needed.

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People merging have right of way only on the parisian périphérique. On all other motorways in France, the merging cars must yield.

It is common courtesy to move over or match speed so they can merge more easily, but that's not the law.

Interestingly, I believe this manoeuvre (move over to make room for cars entering the highway) is banned in Germany, because it can cause accidents as the cars from the slower right lanes suddenly move to the left lanes.

That is not correct - making room is legal and encouraged. You are free to use left lanes for good reasons - being too lazy to switch lanes is the one common not good reason.

High speed driving requires looking far ahead to anticipate lane changes of other drivers.

For somebody with seemingly so much experience its interesting how incorrect yet confident you are. Maybe less bragging about meaningless numbers (kms driven are much more important) and more fact-checking in the future?

I mean, on one trip alone I drove over 7000km. If I said something incorrect, feel free to point it out. Sometimes people don't remember every single detail of every law of a country they don't live in. Maybe less condescending hostility in the future?

I don't think they're talking about merging on a highway?

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.

Well, the signs described in the article are only used on the highways, so if they were talking about non-highway driving I guess they may have missed that detail heh

I'm not talking about highways but country roads. The signs cancelling give way to the right are used in many urban and rural locations. But the absence of them doesn't always mean give way to the right -- you might be able to see they have a stop sign, or the smudge of a line indicating a stop sign you can't see. It's incredibly bad design.

> "people merging in from the right have the right-of-way" actually makes sense to me

Yeah but they don't; priority to the right never happens on motorways, all insertions lanes have “Cédez le passage” signs.

Do you know of any official government-supplied reference for this information? No worries if not, but I'm trying to find something definitive because I am seeing opposing information all over the place (including on authoritative-sounding travel/tourism sites).

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)

Reduced to 80km/h since 2018.

Oh right, I totally forgot! I mean, even then, for so many of those roads I'd never consider driving that fast haha

Paris' périphérique is nowadays limited to 50 km/h.

Practically people go much faster than 80km/h.

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