Our local town Cadillac is a medieval bastide, a walled town, with a grid of narrow little streets that would always have been a tight squeeze for carts to pass each other, let alone two white vans. In fact it’s always worked pretty well, most of the streets are one way and even on market day people tend to park on just one side of the street so the traffic keeps moving.
Someone on the council appears to have decided that a little re-organisation is necessary, possibly to allow better access to a small car park behind the post office. Only so far it hasn’t quite turned out as intended…
This road used to be one way down the hill;
And there is a sign right at the top indicating that this part has two-way traffic:
Fine. Except that 15 metres down the road there is a small one way street coming from the church and opposite that there’s this:
I think that’s supposed to say that this is a one way street, though the sign underneath seems to indicate minds haven’t been firmly made up on the subject yet. And if any luckless drivers happen to look to the right, they’ll see this:
This new system appears to operating brilliantly. Everyone seems to have a different interpretation of what the signs mean and are simply doing whatever suits them (no change there, then), but they’re doing it really slowly.
They’ve already removed most of the road markings in Cadillac in an effort to get drivers to slow down but whoever hit on making the road signs so incomprehensible that everyone is too confused to speed is an absolute genius.
I wonder when it’ll spread to other French towns.
Victoria Corby 
Do I take it that the maire’s cousin is a rep for a firm making traffic control signs?
I don’t know the maire so couldn’t say. However Cadillac has a very large psychiatric hospital and we were wondering if someone on day release was pput in charge of the traffic signs. It’s better than last week, there was a No Entry Sign on top of the two way traffic sign as well.
It looks as if someone had fun doing this! A few years ago, one of our local towns changed to sens unique all the way around the town, only it didn’t publicise it very well, so people were still struggling to go the other way against the traffic and wondering why everyone was on the wrong side of the road.
They did something like that in Cadillac, slapped a No Left Turn on tthe bottom of the bridge and stationed the gendarmes there to book everyone who didn’t notice it.
Very funny and very french 😉
The only thing that I don’t buy is the sign on the 3rd picture.
it does not say one way street but ‘you have to turn left before you reach this sign’. So if you see it in front of you (like on the picture) there must be a road/street where you can turn left before you pass it.
http://www.passetoncode.fr/panneaux-de-signalisation/panneaux/obligation/2/#top
Zooming on the picture you can (easily) see that the white sign below is not part of the road sign (it is behind the pole, not on it) and it’s a fake.
The the right-pointing triangle has been obviously “added” (compare the 2 triangles, the left one is OK the other one is not of the same colour, and the ‘edges” are not ‘straight lines’
Some youngsters having fun maybe?…
That sign is perfectly genuine, I remember it well – it was originally there to show everyone coming out of the side turning that though the right was one way you were allowed to go left too. They must have forgotten to take it down when they put up the new sign on top