Or, how not to drive on one-way-roads.
Some cities, predominately newer cities, follow a logical and well laid out city plan. Generally these consist of a series of boulevards and major highways to handle bulk commuter traffic, a set of well maintained connecting roads to allow the convenient flow of travel between, and lots of parking spaces decidedly off the major roads. Paris has none of these things; at least not in any obvious or recognizable fashion. The one thing Paris does have is a very decent and well maintained bypass or peripheral road known as ‘La Peripherique’ which lets you conveniently and efficiently skip the entire city while on your way somewhere. Oddly, this is about the only road we didn’t go on while passing through.
It’s not that we missed it, took a wrong turn or simply forgot. Instead we decided (call it for ‘flavour’, ‘the experience’ or ‘the challenge’) to navigate the middle of Paris using a woefully under-detailed map, a poor sense of preservation of sanity and no GPS. At 3 in the morning. After driving for nearly 8 hours, and after working most of the previous day. Let’s put it down as a weakness in judgement.
Some advice for those seeking to cross Paris by car: don’t. If you really must do so, then do it East/West rather than North/South. The reason I say this is that like many ancient cities, Paris was built along a major river: the river Seine, which means there’s only a certain number of crossings available. Granted, we were headed straight through the middle so our choices were somewhat more limited, but it did leave some annoying questions about how to actually get across. Secondly, because it was built along a river the roads in the centre of the city are very narrow, and very convoluted. To help reduce the traffic that would be sure to build up on such roads, many, if not most of them are one way. This leads to the very interesting situation where you can actually lay eyes upon your destination, but due to inconvenient road design, the only way to get there is by going a kilometer or two out of your way. This was exactly our problem with getting across the river since we knew exactly where the bridge was but to get to it required traversing half a dozen small cobblestone connecting roads to avoid construction works and one way streets.
The other issue with traversing Paris, or in reality any city you’re not particularly familiar with, is the fact that at some point most of the signage begins to relate to important cultural sites or monuments: and when you have little, if any idea what geographical relationship these sites may hold to one another, it can lend its self to being more confusing rather than less. Unfortunately in many cases a roadmap simply doesn’t do these sites justice or give you any bearing on their locations.
All in all it was interesting driving around blindly Paris, and rendered slightly more tolerable by the fact we were doing it early in the morning before most sane people were awake. That said, I don’t think I’d go out of my way to do it again.
