In France you are allowed to drive a 125cc scooter with a car driver’s license. In other countries a vehicle like this is considered to be a motorcycle in other countries. So I decided to buy a Suzuki Burgman 125cc scooter for my commute.

Coming from the Western suburbs it takes me about 1 hour to get to work with public transportation. With the scooter however, it takes me 25-30 minutes top.

The reason for the short time is the position of the scooter on French roads. By law a scooter has to behave like a car. However in practice a totally different scene takes place on the roads around Paris…

Scooters sometimes drive up till twice the maximum speed. On top of this, scooters go in between the regular car lanes and pass by all the cars. In practice this means getting from A to B in Paris on a scooter is probably one of the fastest modes of transportation.

When driving my scooter I sometimes felt like being in the middle of a high speed car chase in an action packed movie, or an episode of 24. This feeling even becomes stronger  when a police car or ambulance would be leading the way, followed by a group of scooters and motor cycles.

Come to think of it, Jack Bauer  never drove a motor cycle, let a lone in Paris traffic. So I must be tougher than Jack Bauer…

When I get to one of these zebra crossing without ligths I approach it as a Dutch zebra crossing. In the Netherlands pedestrians have the right of way by law. So in NL you touch the zebracrossing and cars stop (usually). However in France you have to be a little bit more persistant.

I step onto the zebra crossing. Then I make eye contact with the approaching car and kind of start crossing. Cars always stop for me somehow, much to the amazement of French people. I don know if this is the Duch way, but it works for me.So if you drive a car in the Paris area… I will be looking you in the eye!

Not organized

In France people don’t necessarily drive as “organized” as in the Netherlands or the USA. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. On the high way (French: “autoroute”) for example they make very sudden moves when they take the exit ramp. Also in Paris there are very chaotic roundabouts and the movements are very quick. Some might label this as aggressive but I would rather label it as being more passionate or energetic. This is just something you will get used to whenever you drive in another culture. For example in the USA they seem to drive much slower and less abruptly.

Parking 

There are however some real differences to what I am used to. One is the parking. In the area we live in there is not a lot of parking space. Very often you see parking that would only have been possible using a crane, in my frame of reference. Numerous times I have seen people exit a parking spot bumping into the cars parked in front and behind them. We have noticed a lot of small dents in a lot of cars, including our second hand one.

Parking in Paris

What ya looking at?

Something else I have noticed that only Dutch people do is the following. In the Netherlands very often on the highway when I would be passed by the driver would look into my car. I caught myself displaying the same behavior especially when I would not agree with the driving of the person in front of me. I would look into the car after passing by. We noticed on the “autoroute” that no one here does this. A colleague of mine told me that they only do it when there is a beautiful girl in the car… So I guess that is why they were looking into our car when we were on our travels to the Netherlands Now I know what they were looking at

When we bought the Peugeot the bureaucracy began. We had to fill in lots of forms. One for the seller one for the vendor and one for the “prefecture”. Some days after I went to the “Sous-Prefecture” of Saint Germain en Laye to get a ” carte grize” (gray card) for our car. In France there is no frequent road tax. They have toll roads (worth their money). The other thing you register a car on your name you have to pay a certain onetime amount. This amount depends on the car (size, engine, pollution etc) and the town you register it. In our case it was 320 euro for the Peugeot 307.

Then after waiting for 40 minutes in line I came to a desk with a lady asking me what I wanted. After telling her she gave me another paper to fill out (the same data as on the ones I filled out before). But I figured this other form would end up at some other place. However when I came to the teller the two form were stapled together. This to me was the ultimate form of bureaucracy. Two forms with exactly the same data stapled together!

Then I needed to check for a new license plate. For this I was directed to some truck. There was an old man in the midst of hundreds of license plates. He spoke in a non understandable French (for me). He asked me something I couldn’t understand. He checked my new “carte grize” and said I didn’t need a new license plate. This is the story how we got our car.