Incomplete faction - Paris mayor announces new Marchelib' shoe sharing scheme

Do you live in or around Paris? Or are you thinking of a trip to the French capital?

Well here's some news for all those trying to make their way around the City of Light.

The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, has plans to make it easier for you.

A bit wobbly on two wheels and still unsure as to whether you can defend yourself in the precarious bicycle lanes that have been squeezed out of the existing roads?

Fed up of going bumper-to-bumper and getting nowhere slowly on the Boulevard Périphérique, the ring road separating Paris from its suburbs?

Not keen on suffering unwanted, almost sexual, encounters while sardined into the Métro?

Delanoë,  has the answer.

First he gave us Vélib', the bicycle sharing system launched in the summer of 2007.

Then Delanoë introduced the electric car sharing Autolib' programme guaranteed to annoy any driver stuck behind one of those flippin' dinky toys and render even the most mild-mannered motorist (not easy in Paris) barmy.

And now he's planning to go one step further with the world's first ever shoe sharing scheme - Marchelib'.

The idea is a simple one: using the same pick up and drop off stations already available for Velib', Parisians, out-of-towners, visitors - in fact just about everyone - will be able to grab a pair of walking shoes or boots and strut their stuff happily through the City of Light.

The announcement came on Monday as part of a package of measures aimed at trying to reduce pollution levels in Paris - still too high at certain times of the year and which contravene EU regulations - and simultaneously piss off the maximum number of motorists.

Among the proposals are a reduction of the speed limit on the ever-flowing (as if) Boulevard Périphérique from 80km/h to 70km/h (as if), a ban all cars older than 17 years from the city centre (and drivers with less than 17 years of experience), the introduction of a péage, or toll, on the motorways immediately surrounding the capital to limit the number of trucks and the launch of Marchelib'.

"These propositions represent a new step in our battle against pollution," Delanoë said on RTL radio.

"Parisians have changed their habits in the past decade because we've dared (to introduce progressive policies) but pollution still remains a scourge," he continued.

Delanoë added that Marchelib' would not only help cut drastically the levels of pollution, it would also make Parisians fitter, healthier and give a boost to the economy by insisting that the shoes supplied would only be "Made in France".

The mayor, a prominent member of the Socialist party, said he would be talking to the government minister in charge of industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, to help draw up a list of French cobblers who could meet the new schemes requirements.

Time to strut your stuff.

Take it away Nancy!

Wedding party procession brings to Paris ring road to a standstill

A word of warning if you're ever invited to a wedding in Paris.

Make sure you don't get too carried away in the festivities by infuriating other drivers in the capital or worse still the police by joining in the potential havoc of the procession of vehicles making its way from the official ceremony to the reception.

Le Boulevard Périphérique, Porte Maillot (screenshot YouTube video)

You could end up facing a prison sentence, a fine and the suspension of your licence.

That's a lesson two guests learned the hard way after they attended a wedding at the end of April.

After tying the knot, the newlyweds and their cortège made their way on to the four-lane ring road le boulevard périphérique, creating a two-kilometre tailback.

It's a practice which according to police has become "more and more frequent in Paris" and one which "frustrates other motorists caught up in the congestion."

As the accompanying video posted on YouTube last year of a similar marriage cortège on le boulevard périphérique attests, the wedding party might be having fun, but is sure doesn't help the flow of traffic - far from it.



April's celebrations all proved too much for one motorist who put in a call to the police to put an end to the festivities after being caught up in the jam,

When they arrived, the police arrested two guests who had been "weaving from lane to lane without warning"  apparently "unaware that their behaviour constituted a criminal offence."

They now face a court date at the end of May, a possible two-year prison sentence and a €4,500 fine as well as the withdrawal of their licences.

A wedding some certainly won't forget in a hurry.

Hortefeux says heavy snowfall in Paris made travel "complicated"

Perhaps France's interior minister Brice Hortefeux was living on a different planet on Wednesday.

Or maybe he just hadn't seen a news report or stuck his nose out of the window.

Because at four o'clock in the afternoon, after snow had been falling in the French capital and its suburbs for a couple of hours, Hortefeux held a press conference.

Or should that be a "I haven't got a clue what I'm talking about but I'm going to say something because it's my job" session?

Using what can surely only be termed as political pussyfooting, and thereby denying any responsibility for the authorities having been ill-prepared, Hortefeux told the assembled hacks that getting in and around Paris and the surrounding region of Ile de France was "complicated" but not a "mess".

Brice Hortefeux "There isn't a mess" during press conference (screenshot TF1 news)

Just a slight error in the minister's description of the situation though as anyone in the French capital at the time could have told him.

It was indeed already a "mess", had been for many for several hours and would continue to be so for the rest of the afternoon, evening and through the night.

Just half an hour before Hortefeux made his statement, flights at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport had been suspended (they resumed a couple of hours later), heavy goods vehicles had been banned from the motorways in Ile de France, and only a handful of buses were running.

The snow was falling thick and fast (11 centimetres in total according to Météo France) and tailbacks were already beginning on each of the major axes in and out of Paris.

As television news reports in the evening showed, many motorists were well and truly stuck and would remain in their cars for most of the night.

Tailbacks measuring in total (a record) 394 kilometres were reported at one point, special reception areas were opened for those who were stranded, and even those who tried getting around on foot were having problems.

Extra police were deployed to help out but still the situation in Paris and its suburbs wasn't a "mess" because the interior minister had said so.

Interviewed later on Europe 1 radio, Hortefeux insisted that he hadn't been trying to deny that there had been problems but simply that the situation had worsened very quickly.

And he was backed up by the environment minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet who said (and here there's a bit of paraphrasing going on) that even though the region had been put on alert beforehand, the real problem had been the amount of snow that had fallen.

Ergo even though all the evidence at the time pointed to the contrary and Paris was indeed paralysed for several hours, as far as officialdom was concerned the situation was not a "mess".

Reflecting maybe on the reality of the situation, Hortefeux released a press statement on Thursday morning calling on motorists to avoid Paris and its suburbs.

Of course this isn't the first time recently that a government minister has managed to put a rather rose-tinted spin on what is actually happening.

When oil refinery workers went on strike in October, the then environment minister Jean-Louis Borloo urged French motorists to remain calm and reassured them that there was no risk of a fuel shortage.

A statement which unhappily proved to be far removed from what happened.

"Pagaille" : les autorités se défendent

Loose horses bring motorway to a standstill

Drivers on a motorway in eastern France had more than just the usual rush hour traffic to contend with on Wednesday morning after 23 horses broke loose from an equestrian centre and galloped their way to freedom.

Horse rescue on A36 motorway, screen shot FR3 Television

Somehow the 23 horses from equestrian centre in the village of Brognard managed to escape from a field in which they had been grazing and headed off towards the A36.

As the regional daily L'Est républicain reports, once the cavalcade hit the motorway between the towns of Montbéliard and Belfort, the horses panicked, breaking up into smaller groups and galloping off in different directions.

Police, firefighters and workers on a nearby high-speed railway line joined forces to take matters in hand, reports the paper, but it still took a couple of hours for all the horses to be rounded up before the traffic could return to normal.

(You can see some more photos of the rescue on the newspaper's site)

The only wounds the horses sustained apparently were to a couple of cuts that needed stitches and one horse which required a sedative after finding itself trapped between the motorway's security barriers.

The whole incident could have had a far unhappier ending as a spokesman for the equestrian centre said when contacted by the French website Le Post.

There had been 38 horses in total in the field but 15 of them had stayed put.

"The other 23 are now back in their boxes and are under observation," the spokesperson told the website.

"Fortunately no person was injured during the breakout and there wasn't a pile up on the motorway."

Des chevaux sur l'A 36

Marseille's overzealous radars have motorists seeing red

Careful how you drive if you happen to be paying a visit to the southeastern French city of Marseille.

Recently-installed radars are doing their work - and then some - and not always to the benefit of the law-abiding motorist it would appear.

In a manner of speaking they're going into overdrive to such an extent that they're even flashing stationary motorists...or nothing at all.

The "culprits" - for let's call them that - are radars installed at traffic lights at notoriously busy junctions in the city.

There are five of them so far and their arrival was greeted with something of a fanfare when they were first made an appearance in France's second largest city last October.

The intention was and remains not to measure whether drivers were keeping to the speed limit, but simply to ensure they respected the traffic lights.

There were a few (inevitable) teething problems in the first couple of weeks, when some of the radars were taking their job a little too seriously and flashing any and every passing vehicle, no matter what colour the light.

But as it was a test phase during which no fines were being handed out for motorists "caught on camera", their installation was greeted with what could perhaps be called a certain degree of "favourable sceptism".

According to a poll conducted at the time by the regional newspaper, La Provence, 58 per cent of those questioned said they welcomed the new radars.


Admittedly there were of course some who thought that the whole scheme was just another way of the local authority to increase its coffers with each infraction carrying not only a loss of points but also a €135 fine.

Those initial problems don't seem to have been solved though, and the radars are still flashing in cases where there has been no infraction and that opens up the way for anyone to make a challenge as far as a local lawyer, Arnaud Attal is concerned.

"The system just isn't reliable," he says.

"I dread to how often people who cross these junctions several times a day such as local traders are being 'flashed' (for no reason at all)," he continues.

"Sometimes the radars go off when there isn't even a car around."

Whatever the problems drivers in Marseille might currently be facing, the problem could get worse.

The scheme is due to be widened to include 150 similar radars being installed in the whole of the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (PACA) in south-eastern France.

Happy driving?

Panicking ponies join busy Paris traffic

Now here's a sight you don't see every day in Paris - thank goodness.



And one motorists on the boulevard périphérique, the busy ring road around the French capital, probably had a hard time believing: riderless ponies galloping through the traffic.

It happened on Saturday afternoon as some children were out riding ponies belonging to the Cartoucherie equestrian centre located next to the Bois de Vincennes in the east of Paris.

They - the ponies that is - were suddenly startled and hurtled off to join the traffic as this amateur video, featured on the website of the national daily edition of Le Parisien - Aujourd'hui en France, shows.

Des poneys en cavale sur l'A4 et le périph parisien
par thony911

"Some cars arrived that were driving too fast and sounded their horns," Raphaël Mollion, the director of the centre said.

"One of the ponies took fright and started the stampede with the others following."

In total eight ponies threw their riders and headed off into the distance towards the busy boulevard périphérique, some making it as far as to a stretch of one of the motorways leading into Paris - the A4.

While several of the panicking ponies were rounded up quite quickly, others eluded police and firefighters for nearly two hours before they too ended their dalliance with delights of Paris traffic - and French drivers - and were caught.

"It could all have ended very differently," admitted Mollion.

"None of the children who fell off the ponies was hurt, and neither were any of the ponies."

French motorcyclist fined for wearing contact lenses

All right the headline is a little misleading as will become clear. But in essence it's what happened.

Once again it's time to say "road users in France beware".

After the recent case of a motorist being fined (€22) for smoking behind the wheel of his car, comes the story of a motorcyclist being pulled over for not "having glasses about his person" - to put it in good "police speak".

It happened last Tuesday on the streets of the French capital as Jérôme, an engineer, set out on his motor scooter to an appointment at the dentist.

At one point on his journey he ran a traffic light as it turned amber to "avoid braking too suddenly". But as (bad) luck would have it a couple of police officers saw him and he was stopped.

Now, what would have been a standard infraction with a possible €22 fine quickly escalated to something a little more absurd as he was asked for his papers, which the 37-year-old duly handed over.

Jérôme you see is near-sighted and as such required by law to wear glasses, or at least have them somewhere in the vehicle when driving, although the language on his licence puts it in a more gobbledygook fashion than that.

At least that's how the officers on duty interpreted the law.

Well he wasn't wearing glasses, but he was wearing contact lenses, which you might be thinking would have conformed with the sense of what was actually written on his licence.

Er....think again.

Because he didn't have a supplementary pair of glasses with him, one of the police officers handed Jérôme a €90 fine and lopped three points from him for "driving a vehicle without respecting the restrictions mentioned on his licence."

What's more he also advised him to "read the highway code again."

And that's exactly what Jérôme did, but he couldn't find the exact text to which the officer was referring and has decided to contest the fine.

"I don't consider it to be justified," he said.

"I'm not a danger to society and besides without lenses I don't see anything."

He's not alone in thinking the officer overreacted and has of Jean-Baptiste Iosca, a lawyer specialising in the rules of the road and traffic contraventions.

"The law requiring all drivers to carry a pair of glasses in the glove compartment of the vehicle was repealed in 1997," he said.

"I dealt with a similar case in May this year and my client was not charged."

Um. Who should it be Jérôme rereading the highway code?

War of the roads over a one-way Paris street

Thank goodness for the prefect of the suburban Parisian département of Hauts-de-Seine, Patrick Strzoda, and the rest of his administrative team.

They've put an end, albeit temporarily perhaps, to a dispute between two neighbouring mayors within the département; a quarrel that had threatened to create havoc for local residents and businesses as well as rush hour commuters, and indeed proved to be the case on Monday.

That's when motorists using the Route Départementale 909 (RD 909) that runs through the communes of Levallois-Perret and Clichy found themselves faced at one point with one-way signs pointing in opposite directions.

Gilles Catoire the Socialist mayor of Clichy decided that as of August 31, the section of the RD 909 passing his commune would become a one-way road in the in the direction north-south.

It was a reaction to a decision made by Patrick Balkany, the centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) mayor of the neighbouring commune of Levallois-Perret, to make the stretch of the same road that ran through his municipality one-way but in the opposite direction (south-north) on the same day.

The result on Monday was the inevitable absurd situation for motorists as they arrived at the point where the two sections of the road met...with one-way signs in place literally face-to-face preventing them from continuing ahead.

Instead police were on duty to redirect traffic to another street to avoid the newly-installed one-way systems which were causing near gridlock, testing nerves and of course generally adding to the woes (as well as journey time) of the nearly 20,000 vehicles that pass through the particular intersection every day.

Chaos had of course been on the cards for several weeks ever since Balkany announced his decision in an effort to decrease the amount of traffic passing along the Levallois stretch of the RD 909.

Catoire, fearing it would see a surge in congestion on the Clichy portion of the road, had threatened to retaliate with a tit-for-tat move, although to give him his due he did make the offer to Balkany to suspend the decision if his Levallois counterpart did the same.

Neither of course backed down and it was only after a morning of predictable mayhem that a "higher authority" in the shape of the prefect of Hauts-de-Seine, who presumably had a somewhat wider view on how everyone might be affected, put an end to the wrangling and suspended both newly-installed one-way systems.

So the status quo has been re-established - but for how long?

Watch this space.

Rush hour "motorway" madness hits French town

Spare a thought for the inhabitants of Sannois, a town of 25,000 on the outskirts of Paris, and perhaps also for motorists on their way to work in the French capital.

Every weekday morning for an hour from 7.30am the town centre shudders and judders to the rhythm of passing traffic, and one small residential road in particular has locals feeling as though they're living alongside a motorway.

It's all thanks to the wonders of modern technology. Drivers aren't there by accident, rather it's that helpful little motorist's mate, the GPS (SatNav) that has directed them there.

The route is supposed to be an alternative to sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the nearby A15 motorway, with the computerised voice of in-car navigation advising motorists whose cars are equipped with GPS to take an exit and make their way through the town to avoid congestion further ahead.

Instead they now find themselves slap bang in the middle of another delightful traffic jam, which leaves tempers fraying, locals furious and the town almost gridlocked.

There's one street in particular that's especially hard hit, the narrow residential rue des Saules-Bridault.

One local, who has been living in the street for the last 22 years told the national daily, Le Monde, that the situation had become unbearable.

"It has been like this for the past couple of years," Joëlle Roussel the paper.

"The street has become an alternative motorway. The other day I had to let 18 cars pass before I could get out of my driveway."

Roussel is not alone, and it's not just those living locally who want to drive to work who are having problems with the excess traffic. Pedestrians also feel they're taking their lives in their hands.

"It has become complete madness every morning," another resident, Paul Couturier, told the paper. "When I take my son to school, I have to put him on my shoulders to avoid the risks of passing cars."

Stéphane Lagresle, the European marketing director for Tele Atlas, a company that provides digital maps for in-car navigation (among other things) told TF1 news that GPS in itself wasn't to blame, as motorists could always programme another route that might at first appear less logical to the system.

He explained that when calculating the "quickest" route GPS currently only takes into account speed limits and not traffic lights or roundabouts which could effectively lengthen journey time.

So a news team decided to test for themselves what motorists were being told by their GPS as they headed into Paris along the A15 during rush hour. And sure enough the computerised voice told them to take the exit that would have them passing directly through Sannois and along rue des Saules-Bridault.

"The current state of affairs is encouraging all drivers to become verbally aggressive and contributing to road rage," Geneviève Malidin, from a committee representing local residents said.

"And that's especially true if someone is trying to back out of their garage into the street."

Residents are fed up with waiting for technology to progress enough for an "intelligent GPS" to factor in all possible variants to dissuade motorists from following to the letter, a route that's not proving any quicker than remaining on the motorway. They're putting pressure on the local council to act.

The mayor of the town, Yannick Paternotte, has announced that a commission will be set up to resolve the problem - especially that of rue des Saules-Bridault, and there'll be a public enquiry. But he also issued a word of warning.

"We have to find an overall solution," he said. "It won't be enough to put a no-entry sign on this street as that will simply divert the problem to another road."

As they say here in France, "Bonne route". Or in this case, maybe not.

How things have changed. Sannois, rue d'Eaubonne
and station, circa 1900 (from Wikipedia. Copyright expired)