One silver lining of the pandemic in France: Driving around the Place de l’Etoile is not nearly as scary as it used to be.
This is even though France has almost entirely reopened, as of this month. Stores and restaurants are open, as is the Louvre down at the other end from the Etoile. For pre-booked visits only.
But traffic, like a lot of other things in Paris, hasn’t picked up to where it used to be. People are working at home, or got laid off, or are riding bicycles. The result is that cars move smoothly around the Etoile circle, and so do other means of conveyance.
I was slow to adapt to driving in Paris when we moved here in 1996. Especially compared with my husband, who mastered getting around the city in about three days. I was – and remain – freaked out by priorité à droite (priority on the right).
That rule means that you have to cede to anyone coming from a street on your right, even if it’s smaller, or pretty much all the time while going around a circle. In Paris and a few other cities, that is. (For a list of exceptions, click here, where you will also learn why getting a French driver’s license is such a nightmare.)
As you can imagine, the enormous traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe, with 12 avenues shooting in and out, is the ne plus ultra of Paris driving.
I began driving in Paris by tackling one route at a time. Home to office, for instance. We had a company car and we had a parking place at the office. All I had to do was get from one to another. Then home to school. One by one, I built a series of trajectories that could get me around the city, even if some of them were a little indirect.
But I couldn’t bring myself to enter the giant wheel-and-spoke Etoile. Charlie tried accompanying me once and almost had to grab the wheel when a taxi darted in front of me and I screeched. Even though everyone I knew seemed to handle it with aplomb. “Just use your peripheral vision,” my friend Marie said. I did, and didn’t like what I saw.
What I didn’t realize was that, as is so often the case in France, those drivers were following a mutually agreed-upon set of rules that were written nowhere. They knew how to perceive how their speed compared with that of others and make the right move, whether speeding up or slowing down, instinctively. They knew which drivers were likely to try to cut them off, and which would hold back.
I started getting the hang of it with the advice of an American friend. “Get yourself a blocker,” she said. That is, settle in with a car on your right that’s going about the same speed as you. If they slow, you slow, and vice versa. That driver can make the decisions for you. At least until you have to exit the circle.
Needless to say, the lockdown virtually emptied out the streets of Paris – and the circles. For 56 days, almost no one entered or left any of those 12 avenues.
Photo: Christopher Dickey
By that time, we no longer had a car, and weren’t allowed out of the house anyway. Even before the lockdown, we used those rental cars that you check out and return like a library book. Me a little, Charlie a lot.
Now, traffic in the place de L’Etoile is just the way I like it. Some vehicles, enough to follow my blocker, but not so many I get my signals crossed. On a recent trip around the circle on a rental bike, I had no trouble making the circuit. OK, it was Sunday morning. But I was honked at by two cars and a motorcycle, so I knew I must be doing the right thing.