You can't go to the cinema these days without being forced to watch one of the government's latest films about road accidents. Apart from the fact that they have a jolly Amélie Poulain tone of voice that seems wholly inappropriate to the subject, there's another thing about them that bothers me.
In almost every ad, the driver who ends up dead is either drunk or stoned, or both. Fair enough. But often they're also killed because the car that smashed into them had the right of way, thanks to the priorité à droite system. I never drive in Paris, because it terrifies me. Parisian drivers ignore pedestrian crossings, break the speed limit and seem to think that traffic lights are a suggestion. But priorité à droite scares me the most.
What idiot - no, let's be blunt -, what asshole decided it would be a good idea to let cars come whizzing out of a side street onto a main road? How does this help anyone? Is it because you're all too impatient to wait at a junction? Given the sheer foolishness of the system, I'm not surprised that cars are always slamming into motorbikes.
Tourists from countries with more logical road rules must get killed by the truckload. By all means encourage drivers to stop drinking. But until the rules on giving way to the right are changed, the accidents de la route will continue.
