Our local library, like many others, sponsors courses on Defensive Driving. These are aimed mainly at senior citizens, and it’s true that on today’s roads we need all the defense we can get. In its simplest and most direct form, Defensive Driving means simply buying a very large SUV, or better still a full-size truck or a military surplus armored vehicle with weapons still attached, and daring anyone to argue.
If you don't believe that the best form of defense is attack, you can enroll in one of the many Defensive Driving courses that claim to offer a kinder, gentler road to safety. You can even get a small reduction on your insurance premiums. After several near accidents with maniacs running stop signs at fifty miles an hour while talking on their phones, I almost enrolled in a Defensive Driving course myself. Instead, to sharpen up those survival instincts, we came to France.
The transition from American to European driving is always a shock. Your European car seems the size of a skateboard, you are surrounded by gigantic trucks, and everybody is hurtling along at eighty miles an hour. The French are not aggressive drivers, but they are competitive. They want to see what you can do, what you can survive, in much the same spirit as drivers in a demolition derby. For the first couple of hours after picking up a car in France I find myself gripping the wheel tightly and trying to decide which of the major world religions offers the best deal in the case of sudden death. But, as the kilometers roll by I relax into the universal religion of French motorists: fatalism.
Fatalism is built into the French highway system. Among the great scenic treasures of this nation are millions of stately plane trees that line so many of her highways. They were planted two centuries ago to provide shade for Napoleon’s marching armies. But they are not exactly a safety feature for modern drivers: one mistake, and you’re dead. The most famous victim was the writer Albert Camus, who met his fatal tree in 1960. Fifteen years ago, to reduce the numbers of arboreal casualties, the government introduced a scheme to remove or replant five million plane trees so that motorists, like cats with nine lives, would have more chances to survive their own adventurous driving habits. But it didn’t happen, and it wouldn’t have worked in any case. Trees don’t kill people, crazy drivers kill people, and the French love to drive fast. I’m not a particularly slow driver myself, but I can’t keep up with them unless I have put my personal affairs in order, and achieved the right philosophical state of mind.
But appearances are deceptive. The statistics show that in the world league of traffic fatalities France is very close to the bottom, along with other western European countries like Switzerland or Britain. For some really challenging driving you need to go to Afghanistan, with three times the death rate of France, or to Iran with six times the rate. What astonished me though was to find that, when it comes to fatal accidents, the United States is twice as dangerous as France, and more or less on a par with Ukraine.When and if I get back to Long Island I may decide to take that Defensive Driving course after all.
Copyright: David Bouchier
