For Xmas, we drove across France, from Strasbourg to Chizé.
You know Chizé - near Niort?
You know Niort - in the Deux-Sèvres Département?
You know, in Poitou-Charentes Région?
OK - forget it, but it's right over the other side of France.
880km by autoroute.
In spite of the generally exceptional amounts of cold & snow everywhere this December, we didn't have either for the trip out.
Just a few patches of fog & several periods of rain.
In the foggy bits, most people used rear fog lamps, which clearly proved their worth.
In the rain, their use is illegal.
And the cause of near-homicidal pulsions from otherwise-reserved motorists.
Something I can understand in low-speed, night-time conditions, when they can be very dazzling.
But in high(ish) speed, daytime, autoroute rain, when all vehicles are followed by their own private fog bank?
Several cars were using their rear fog lamps in those conditions.
Either left over from the foggy bits or deliberately used in spray conditions.
And there is no doubt whatsoever that they:
1. Don't dazzle in daylight.
2. Vastly improve visibility & hence safety.
This is one section of the highway code which could usefully be revised.
But probably never will be, due to the emotions it seems to stir.
Parting thot: "Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." - Albert Einstein
Roundabouts have become a major feature of French roads in the last decade or so.
This is an excellent thing for safety, compared with any cross-roads junction, with or without traffic lights.
Personally, I find it a good thing for my nerves too, as any hold-up is obviously due to the amount of traffic & not to some absent idiot having screwed up the timing schedules for the lights.
I don't have any proof, but I suspect the overall waste of time & energy is lower for roundabouts than for traffic lights or Stop signs as well.
Having belatedly adopted roundabouts, the French are doing a nice job in decorating them.
Very few are left as vulgar pieces of traffic chicanery.
Most are lovingly adorned with ordinary or extraordinary floral stuff, which is very pleasing.
Sometimes with real or simulated historical remains or icons of local industry or folklore.
I think I shall have to start a collection of photographs on this topic…
Leaving Commercy (in the Meuse, which never sounds like a good thing to be in) recently, we were surprised to see a very original roundabout.
Not decorated, as might have been expected, with giant Madeleines (Commercy is the home of the madeleines referred to by Marcel Proust in "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu".) but with big blue cows.
And inexplicable wavy red lines.
And cascades.
And canon balls.
Back home, I have discovered that it is the 1999 creation of eccentric-looking artist/sculptor Patrick Hervelin.
http://radeau.ivre.free.fr/artistesdos/CV-hervelin.html
And that it is called "Les Trois Godelles" (Godelle apparently being local dialect for cow).
But I still have no idea of the significance of any or all of it.
Definitely not boring, anyway.
Parting thot: "Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." - Frank Zappa
As you probably know, French Autoroutes use toll-booths, so payment is more or less per kilometre.
The predictable result is that far too many potential users, particularly lorries, avoid the autoroutes & prefer the old Routes Nationales.
So we have an excellent autoroute network which is relatively empty (Parisian lemmings might not agree on some July/August weekends) while single & dual-carriageway roads, towns & villages are clogged up by unnecessary traffic.
So the autoroute companies don't recover their investment fast enough.
So they keep putting up the prices.
And so on.
This is all a big nonsense.
Any considerations of safety, efficiency, pollution, global warming, balance of payments, health, noise, stress, etc, would say that you should shift as much traffic as possible off ordinary roads & on to autoroutes. (or railways…)
So any payment system should encourage, not discourage, every possible decision to go via autoroute.
Even if it means getting that payment from taxpayers, rather than from users only.
Or from duty on fuel.
Nobody seems to be even suggesting such a move yet, in France.
So, after an initial resentment, I find myself thoroughly in agreement with the various European countries (Switzerland, Austria etc) which have introduced per-time rather than per-kilometre payment, at least for visitors.
They handle this via windscreen stickers called vignettes.
The Swiss one is valid per calendar year, while Austria is more flexible, with a choice of 1 year, 2 months, or 10 days.
Having paid for your vignette, you are surely going to get the most out of it by using autoroutes wherever possible!
I have some minor quibbles with the Swiss vignette though.
It is not meant to be transferred from vehicle to vehicle, for whatever reason.
It is deliberately designed to stick ferociously to the screen and, when you try to remove it, to tear into dozens of tiny shreds which have to be scraped off one by one, using a thin blade, then alcohol to remove the vestiges of glue.
20 minutes of misery every year.
Like a lot of other people (I suppose) I have tried to overcome both these problems by sticking the vignette first to a thin transparent sheet & then getting that to stick to the screen.
It seems to work fairly well, depending on the intermediate sheet, but you know it is illegal & you know how silly you would feel if the hawk-eyed Swiss border guards noticed.
So when I had my broken screen replaced last week, I was intrigued to find that my Swiss vignette (not on any intermediate material this year) had been transferred in apparently perfect condition to my new screen.
I didn't think to ask them how they did it, but I probably will, next time I am in the vicinity.
Trawling through Google, I found various suggestions using solvents, but the most interesting solution seemed to be by heating with a hair-dryer.
Now I just have to wait till January to try it.
Parting thot: "Rules are written for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men." - Douglas Bader
But don't blame me if that does not go down well in court.
We just spent a very pleasant couple of days wandering to & from Troyes.
Taking in the oddly-named Lac du Der & several places from the Michelin guide "Les 100 Plus Beaux Détours de France" which I mentioned previously.
We were very impressed by Troyes, particularly to see so many typical & well-preserved half-timbered buildings.
The above picture is from the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troyes which says I can use it.
I have several similar views of my own, but all with the usual white vans in front.
Lac du Der is actually an artificial reservoir which helps to even out the level of the Marne & the Seine, at the cost of having flooded a lot of land & several villages in the '70s.
I don't want to get into any political arguments between Parisians & Ecologists, but for the vulgar tourist, the result is a very large (10 km long) & attractive piece of water with beaches, birds & boats and plenty of flat cycling opportunities.
From the "Detours" guide, we managed to fit in Toul, Commercy, Bar-le-Duc and Langres, so we shall soon need the guide to the 100 next-best detours.
The only black mark on the trip was a broken windscreen.
A direct result of irresponsible French road repair methods.
All summer, they fix the previous winter's damage by pouring tar on the holes & cracks, then throwing big stone chippings on top.
A large repair will get rolled flat, but they don't bother for small patches.
Then they go away & leave the traffic to flatten it down & to remove the excess chips.
Usually there will be a warning sign & often a 50 km/h speed limit, but not always.
The signs work fairly well for careful owner-drivers, but hardly at all for vans, lorries & commercial travellers.
This time, they had fixed about 10 km of quiet back-road with little patches every few yards & no signs as far as I remember.
I slowed right down every time we met traffic & mostly other people did too.
I was just congratulating myself on having carefully avoided meeting a rather fast lorry on a gritty patch when – bang - the next car threw up just one big chip & the screen had a 20 cm crack.
Back home I was relieved to find that my insurance now covers screen replacement at no cost to me, but of course there is a significant cost to the community.
I don't keep records, but I should think I need screens replaced or resin-repaired about every 4 years.
And always for exactly the same reason.
And I go out of my way to avoid freshly gravelled roads when I can.
And every new car model seems to have a bigger, more sophisticated & more expensive screen than the previous one.
If the road-menders were held responsible for screens broken immediately after their jobs, I think they would soon find a cheap-enough way to set the chips & to remove the excess before leaving their patch to the traffic.
But there is no incentive.
The motorist thinks he has a nice new screen for nothing.
The insurance companies pass on the cost spread over all their customers, so nobody notices.
The government probably thinks it's good for the GDP.
Do other countries handle this better?
Parting thot: "Accidents, and particularly street and highway accidents, do not happen - they are caused." - Ernest Greenwood
I was just looking through l'Auto-Journal for 16 July.
They have a 10 000 km test of a Peugeot 3008 (not to be confused with the 308).
One novelty caught my eye.
There is a head-up-display, which basically shows the vehicle speed digitally on a little transparent screen near the bottom of the windscreen.
Copied from military aircraft practice, if done properly this can keep the speed information in or near the driver's line of sight, without blocking out other vital stuff.
I think the above image is from a Peugeot Press release (it is all over the net) but other reviews include photographs showing that the screen is really better situated, below normal line of sight.
L'Auto-Journal seemed to like it, so I suppose Peugeot have done a decent job.
Previously, I thought of HUD as restricted to the BMW/Cadillac zone, so it is good to see it coming down market.
Something like this will surely become normal practice soon.
What was absolutely new for me though, was that they also display your distance behind the preceding vehicle, expressed simply in seconds.
L'Auto-Journal said of that (my translation) "We didn't find this function to be any use – it seems to be just a gadget".
I couldn't disagree more.
In my view, this function could be of enormous value in preventing accidents & incidents.
Most people (I suppose) know that leaving at least a 2-second gap is essential if you hope to avoid being involved in nose-to-tail pile-ups, yet almost nobody actually leaves that much gap.
The brilliant new Peugeot function should be made universal & compulsory.
With bright flashing lights & unbearably loud buzzers whenever the gap is held below 2 seconds!
And something even more dissuasive for lorry drivers.
Electric shocks?
Automatic licence shredding?
Parting thot: "There are no new accidents, just new victims." - Anon
A few years ago, I would have said pedestrian crossings in France were rare & purely symbolic.
Neither drivers nor pedestrians took much notice of them.
Recently, things are improving & not only are they being used & respected (to some extent…) in cities & towns but they are appearing even in villages.
The very minor cross-roads near our house has just been re-worked & now sports a full set of pedestrian crossings, with white stripes, lowered kerbs and even concrete dots for the visually handicapped.
Good work is also being done in locally narrowing roads & providing central refuges at the crossing points, which has the multiple purpose of reducing crossing distance, preventing overtaking there (except for those who overtake on the wrong side of the central refuge) & generally encouraging "calm" driving by the more tortuous road shape.
All very encouraging.
One thing still badly lacking though, compared with UK, is the zig-zag-lined space either side of the crossing, within which no parking is allowed.
In France, even the official, marked, parking bays often extend right up to the crossing on both sides.
With obvious serious risk for, especially, children unseen & unseeing until it is too late.
Benchmarking still has some way to go, even in Europe.
Parting thot: "Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail." - Abraham Lincoln
Another area of regression in modern vehicles also concerns safety & vision, but is thankfully not general.
Vehicle lighting has been improving steadily for decades and European lighting in particular is excellent.
For instance, orange flashing turn-indicators are clearly better than the red & white indicators still found in USA.
But recently, some new models, particularly from VW group, for example Polo & Passat, have taken to diffusing the turn indicator lamps concentrically round the outside of the rear lamps & brake lamps.
Presumably this is a new possibility offered by LED lighting, which stylists have jumped at because it produces very pretty lamps.
The result is that when rear lamps & brake lamps are on (not an unusual situation) then the turn indicators get lost in the general glare & it is only too easy to fail to see them.
Similar effects are appearing at the front of some new vehicles, where the turn indicators are being integrated closely into a compound front lighting unit, so that they are much too close to the headlamps and therefore invisible when headlamps are on.
At the same time as drivers are being encouraged, or compelled, to drive with headlights on all the time.
In hindsight, it seems obvious that turn signal lamps should be physically separated from headlamps & brake lamps.
By some minimum distance which no doubt could be established scientifically.
The best-ever rear turn signal lamps were on the Citroen DS where they were put at the upper corners of the rear screen.
Immediately visible even in traffic & nowhere near other lights.
That should be compulsory.
Like the third brake lamp has become & for the same reasons.
Again, where is the pressure going to come from, to counteract economic & styling pressures which are leading us to pretty & economical but unsafe solutions?
Parting thot: "To me success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection." – Soichiro Honda
Car engineering has made huge advances in the last 20 years.
But with regression in a couple of areas.
Most obviously in the driver's visibility out.
A few decades back, some cars were approaching the ideal visibility situation, where the driver's front/side view was effectively unimpeded.
This was achieved, for instance on the Citroen DS or the Lotus Elan, by having screen pillars thinner than the spacing between the driver's eyes, so that drivers, at least drivers with 2 eyes, had no blind spot at all.
Increasingly today, screen pillars are getting thicker.
For good reasons.
Mostly this is due to crash strength requirements & roll-over strength requirements.
Additionally, screen pillars are sloping more steeply, partly for styling reasons & partly for aerodynamic (fuel economy) reasons.
Sloping increases the horizontal section width & hence the effective thickness from a visibility viewpoint.
The situation is compounded in many people-carrier vehicles (Opel Meriva, Citroen Picasso) which have introduced an additional pillar each side.
Things are so bad now, blind spots are so big now, that not only pedestrians & cyclists but even cars can be hidden from the driver if they are on a collision course (approaching at a constant angle) as can happen particularly at roundabouts for instance.
I can see why intelligent & responsible engineers are taking design in this dangerous direction.
There is plenty of pressure (rightly) to improve crash safety, to improve fuel consumption, to produce attractive-looking vehicles people want to buy.
There is no pressure (wrongly) to improve driver visibility & hence active safety.
Who should be providing that pressure?
Consumer associations?
Insurance companies?
Governments?
Europe?
We may have to wait a long time!
Parting thot: "Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life." - Kant
We do quite a bit of countryside walking these days & see more & more animals, especially deer & "sangliers" (wild boars).
We often see them dashing across fields, then dashing straight across roads...
There have been several news items on TV about the increase in sangliers all over Europe, notably Berlin & the local paper today says there are 5 times as many in Alsace as a few years ago.
So the risk of meeting an animal when you are driving is quite high & rising.
Another good reason to keep your speed down & your eyes open, in general.
I think it is worth preparing yourself beforehand so you can (maybe) react as well as possible when it happens.
The most important thing is DON'T SWERVE!
If you swerve, you are likely to:
- hit something coming the other way.
- push an overtaking car or motorcycle off the road.
- lose control of your car.
- turn over.
- run into a ditch.
- hit a tree.
All those are probably much worse than hitting an animal.
The next most important thing is to BRAKE AS SOON & AS HARD AS POSSIBLE.
The sooner & harder you brake, the better your chances are of not hitting something.
If you still hit something, you will be going as slow as was ever going to be possible, which is the best you can do for yourself & for the animal.
If you have not practiced braking hard, you almost certainly won't, so practice a couple of times somewhere safe, just to see.
If you don't hear & feel the ABS rattling YOU ARE NOT BRAKING HARD ENOUGH.
- that does not apply to old cars without ABS, like my 2CV.
- of course, you know if your car has ABS or not?
You probably won't have time for more than that.
If you do have time & are SURE there is no other traffic, then look at a bit of road with no animal on it & steer GENTLY at it if it is not going to head you off the road.
Murphy's law says the animal will probably move there anyway...
Concentrate on pointing in a safe direction rather than on avoiding the animal.
If you are going to hit an animal with long legs (deer...) it will probably come over the bonnet & through the windscreen.
This is definitely not a good thing.
If you see that coming.
DUCK LOW TOWARDS THE CENTER OF THE CAR.
SHOUT AT YOUR PASSENGER TO DUCK.
Try to keep braking too!
.................................................
Obviously you won't have time to remember this article while that is happening.
I think you CAN run through it in your head often enough (whenever you are on a boring straight bit of road) and imagine yourself doing it often enough, so that when it happens you have a better chance of doing the right thing & not panicking.
Worth a try!
Parting thot: "The harder you work - the luckier you get." - Sam Goldwyn
Years ago, back in the UK, on a nice sunny day with perfect visibility, I was driving lazily on a straightish 2-lane road with few cross-roads & not much traffic – about as far from an accident situation as it is possible to get.
A nondescript car gradually closed up on me from behind, signalled, overtook, signalled, pulled back well in front of me & eased ahead.
A bit later, I watched, without paying much attention, as he signalled again, pulled out & passed another car in front.
Then, to my horror & disbelief, a car pulled deliberately out of a garage forecourt on the right (transpose for non-UK use) straight into him.
At that point, a head-on collision was unavoidable.
For a long time afterwards, I was unable to imagine how this accident could have happened.
Much later, I was sitting in a café opposite a T junction, idly watching traffic coming up to the T, stopping, and joining the main road.
Those who were turning to their right (transpose for non-UK) and therefore crossing the main road, stopped, looked both ways, waited for suitable gaps, then drove off.
Those turning to their left (transpose…) stopped, looked at the approaching traffic on their right (…) waited for a suitable gap, then drove off – without looking to the left!
Every one!
Suddenly, I understood the original accident.
Subsequent observation showed that drivers only look in the 'expected traffic' direction, including when joining roundabouts (reasonable) or when joining other roads at T junctions or slip-roads (NOT reasonable!).
Analysing my own behaviour, I found I was doing the same…
This was a chilling observation, considering the hundreds of occasions I must have been putting my life at risk up till then.
I have made very sure to look both ways for the last 40 years, but I still need to do it deliberately – it is not a natural reflex.
You should make 2 resolutions, if you don't want to end up some day in a head-on collision: - Look BOTH ways before even starting to put your nose into a traffic lane.
- NEVER, NEVER, NEVER overtake across any opening from which another vehicle could possible emerge. Even if it is obvious he must have seen you…
Parting thot: "A lesson is not learned until behavior changes." - Gordon Sullivan - Chief of Staff U. S. Army
