_Noise_Conspiracy.jpg "The (International) Noise Conspiracy - 002-09-17: 9:30 Club, Washington D.C., USA")
Parisian Motorists
August 5th, 2007 at 23:10
We were sitting in a bar in Paris one evening last week, watching the world go by, when we saw the most incredible thing.
Oh, alright, that’s overselling it a little bit, but its something you don’t see in rural Britain, so that makes it notable enough to write about.
There were some on-street parking spaces outside the bar and a big black Mercedes pulled up, trying to park. The driver parallel parked in only to discover that there wasn’t enough space for his gigantic car to fit. So he did the most logical thing possible: he shunted the silver car next to it backwards in order to fit in the space. This took a few extra goes too, and wasn’t just one smooth motion. With each shunt, the silver car was pushed further and further back, perilously close to a Smart-car, that became boxed into its space.
After this, the driver and his girlfriend/wife/mistress/whatever got out of the Mercedes, he slung his jacket over his shoulder and swaggered off like an officially-certified wanker.
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We stuck around for quite a while waiting for the Smart car driver to return, but there was no sign of him, unfortunately. I had the camera poised to capture the despair on his face.
I don’t know why this was such a surprising sight though, given the state of the rest of Paris’s roads. Surrounding every Place de la Wherever, like the Bastille or the square where they cut off the King’s head during the Revolution is a gigantic roundabout. They all seem to have about eight lanes – only unlike good old British roundabouts, which tend to feature things like lane markings and arrows showing you where to go, Parisian roundabouts are basically a free-for-all.
The only lines painted on them tend to be give way lines before another entrance/exit, which despite the line’s noble intentions, tend to act more like a starting line in a formula one race – they may as well go the whole hog and paint on a box for the car in “pole-position”.
Cars tend to meander about wherever they like and think nothing of cutting people up on their left and right. We actually sat and watched the Bastille roundabout for about fifteen minutes with our jaws on the floor at just how insanely dangerous it was. Someone even had the spectacular idea of putting a taxi-rank on the roundabout itself.
I think the only way they could have made it more dangerous is by designing the roundabout like the big charity money boxes where you slot a coin in at the side and watch it slide around the edge before falling through the centre. Cars would have to keep going faster and faster or risk falling into the Earth’s mantle.
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