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 