I need to explain a bizarre law in France that maybe you are already aware of, but has several subtle side-effects, which, if you have not driven in France, may be new to you. The law I am talking about is the “priorité à droite” (priority to the right) law.
Priorité à droite basically means that any car pulling out from the right onto the road you are driving on takes priority over you. To explain, imagine you are driving down a straight road, you can see for miles in front of you, but, to your right, a road joins yours. A person arrives at the junction and you see him in plenty of time. However, what you don’t know is that this person has right-of-way over you, so can pull out in front of you and you have to stop to let them in, even though, for you, there are no road markings that suggest that it is a junction.
But unfortunately, its not as simple as that, because you should notice two things:
- Some towns don’t apply this law
- Not all junctions follow this rule even in towns that do apply the law
The only way you can know if the person arriving from the right has right of way over you is that there will be a Give Way sign and road markings. However, this is not always visible, so you are required to watch each junction as you approach it.
Lyon is a town where this law does not seem to be applied; let’s say that I haven’t come across such a junction in any case. Here’s the catch though: I live in a town, which, although on the outkirts, is part of the city. However, the town which is 100m down that road is not part of Lyon, which means that, guess what, it does apply the priorité à droite law. But not everywhere.
So yesterday I was driving to the tip (who doesn’t make a few trips to the tip on a rare day off work?), when, I realised that the law applied as I was nearly - but luckily not quite - shunted from the side - the side that my son happened to be sitting on. Another catch in the law is that, if you are French, the only way to pull out blind onto a main road is to studiously avoid looking at what is approaching from your left. This means for me, as an untrusting person, I look at the person pulling out in order to guess whether they will chicken out or not. In most cases though, they don’t even bother to look left for fear of getting into some kind of standoff.
Once, I was driving along a straight road and slowed down for the driver approaching from my right. However, the driver refused to pull out in front of me and we both inched forward, me not wanting to break the law, he not wanting to get shunted by me. Why didn’t I drive on? Well because I have even heard of cases where in a similar standoff position, the person arriving from the right gave the impression that they were waiting, only to pull out as the other car started to move forward. Why? Because the car arriving from the right is in the right (if you see what I mean) and they can use this if they want to get a bit of money out of the insurance company. But this might be an apocryphal story.
A friend summed it up: it’s as if every junction should be treated as a roundabout. That is correct, however, in France, on a roundabout you give way to the left!
Go figure.
