Cars can drive you around the bend in France

Ten years ago – and time does fly even when you’re not having fun – I wrote this piece, mocking French driving: http://www.alexanderboot.com/french-manual-of-defensive-driving/

It was a satirical spoof and, like all works in that genre, had to have some link with reality. And the reality is gruesome.

The French suffer twice the number of road deaths we have in Britain, and the two statistics are diverging: ours is going down, theirs is going up. This though the two populations are roughly equal, French roads are infinitely better and as a rule straighter than ours, and they have 10 times our number of road-miles per car.

Obviously, when millions of people propel tonnes of metal at high speeds, a certain number of accidents, including fatal ones, will happen. But when such numbers climb above realistic expectations, governments feel they must do something about it.

Now, most European governments – hell, down with understatement – all European governments are socialist, which means anti-car. This bias must go back to the time, a century or so ago, when only wealthy people could afford to drive. That put class war on the road, and hostilities have been raging ever since, even though the car has since become basic, often indispensable, transportation.

However, just as iconoclasm persists long after the icons have been smashed, socialists act in character by ignoring reality. As far as they are concerned, no truce is on the cards.

That’s why European governments have been busily trying to drive cars off the road, as it were. They impose extortionist taxes on motorists, introduce frankly unrealistic speed limits, suffocate traffic with bus and cycle lanes or unnecessary islands, charge the earth for parking or entering city centres.

Such punitive measures have always been sold to the public as touching concern for lives, but these days officials can pull another larcenous card out of their sleeve: air quality and climate, both being irredeemably damaged by selfish people who’d rather not get to work by three buses and two underground lines.

Nevertheless people still grit their teeth and get behind the wheel – even in London, where driving to work every day may cost more than the average family income in Britain. And with so many cars on the road, the number of road deaths will never drop down to zero, much as governments may insist this is their ultimate goal.

Since empirical evidence proves that the state can only ever change undesirable situations for the worse, no government can ever make driving safer. But individual drivers can, even in France, with its carnage on public roads.

Yet the French government has to indulge its traditional dirigisme by attacking the problem from its height downwards, which stratagem only works in infantry warfare. As the starting point of the campaign, the government took the universal male derision of woman drivers.

In France, this sentiment is expressed with a little rhyme: “Femme au volant, danger au tournant” (woman at the wheel – danger around the corner). Nonsense, says the French government, and misogynist nonsense at that. In fact, if men drove like women, drivers wouldn’t be dying in their droves.  

Easier done than said. Hey presto, and France has been inundated with the slogan “conduisez comme une femme”, drive like a woman (and never have an accident, is the implication). To support this recommendation, the French manipulate statistics with the legerdemain of a cardsharp.

Women, they say, account for 46 per cent of drivers and yet are eight times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. Here one recalls the old adage about lies, barefaced lies and statistics.

What matters isn’t how many women have a driving licence, but how many miles they actually drive compared to men. In my own two-member family, 50 per cent of the drivers are (is?) female, and yet the male half (well, me) do over 90 per cent of all driving. The same goes for just about every family I know, other than those where the husband is incapacitated, banned, alcoholic or wimpish.

Looking at the French couples I know, it’s true that the men (with one shameful exception) do drive faster than the women but, since none of them has ever been killed, this limited sample can’t be held in evidence. So let’s leave statistics to the sociologists and concentrate on some home truths, uncomfortable as they may be to the modern conscience.

The first such is now controversial but used to be self-evident: men and women are different – biologically, physiologically, psychologically, physically, intellectually and in every other way. Hence a man can no more drive like a woman than he can walk like one, although some do try and look pathetic for it.

Testosteronal aggression makes men more susceptible to the competitive aspect of driving and the lure of an open (or not so open) road. That’s why, for example, only two women have ever raced F1 cars, compared to 776 men, a difference that can’t be wholly ascribed to discrimination.

Moving from the race track to public roads, men do tend to use cars as penile extensions, which in theory will get them into dicey situations more often. However – and it’s not me but physiology speaking – men tend to be more decisive and their reflexes are quicker, which means they can get out of danger more often.

These, however, are generalities. If we now stick to specifics, the problem with French drivers isn’t that they indulge their masculinity, but that they are shockingly bad compared to the English. Hence the disparity in road deaths.

One observation is baffling to me. The French are much more polite than the British when on foot and much less so when behind the wheel. Having driven the best part of a million miles, two thirds of them in the two countries I’m comparing, I feel I’m entitled to such a generalisation.

Where an English driver magnanimously lets you into the lane, a French one is prepared to die defending his right of way. Many do, with drivers overtaking on a single carriageway unable to force their way back in and colliding with an onrushing car head on.

Driving on French motorways, one can’t relax for a second. Lane discipline is abysmal, with cars routinely and blithely venturing into your lane at 100 mph. Tailgating is also widespread, and my heart has sunk many a time when, driving at that kind of speed, I’d see in my rear-view mirror a jalopy steered by a white-knuckled driver an inch behind my bumper.

French drivers are more likely than their British counterparts to come out, change lanes or reverse without looking. Thus any competent driver can safely negotiate, say, Hyde Park Corner, considered the hardest place to drive in London. But driving around l’Etoile in Paris is all your life is worth even if you happen to be Stirling Moss in disguise.

I mentioned jalopies earlier, and this is another factor of road safety. Cars in France tend to be in a terrible state compared to Britain. For one thing, a car in Britain must undergo an MOT test after its first three years and each year thereafter. In France, it’s after the first four years and then every two.

As a result, one sees many cars in the French countryside sputtering, belching black smoke and, most dangerous, breaking down at speed. Many of those cars are grossly underpowered to begin with, which isn’t that much of a problem on a motorway but can be deadly when trying to overtake on a single-lane road. And France being a more agricultural country, overtaking on such roads is essential if you don’t want to be stuck behind a tractor for miles.

On the basis of extensive personal experience, I don’t subscribe to the theory that the French are miserly. But, unlike the British, they’d definitely rather spend their money on things other than cars. In general, this reluctance to show off is commendable, but at a certain point an old car that wasn’t that good to begin with can become a death trap.

Advice to the French: don’t drive like women, nor like men. Instead make sure you have a road-worthy vehicle and drive it well.

That doesn’t necessarily mean driving slowly. There’s no such thing as too much speed – only too much speed for the conditions, including your driving ability and reaction time. Driving fast can be fun, and there’s no need to deprive yourself of it, as long as you know when, where and how to indulge that passion.

And yes, I suppose men are more likely to enjoy driving, rather than just treating it as a way of getting from A to B. But road fatalities aren’t caused by sex differences. They are caused by a nation in need of a remedial driving course – for men, women, other.