Video on the road for French truck drivers

The next time you overtake a big truck on a French highway, try to see if the driver is watching television with his feet up on the dashboard.

As implausible as this sounds, some drivers of poids lourds (heavy trucks), are reported to be resorting to video and other pastimes to fight the boredom of life on the autoroute. The trick is "driving by ear", according to le Figaro, which published alarming reports from motorway maintenance workers yesterday.

When traffic is not too dense, the driver sets the cruise control at the regulation 90 kph limit and puts the truck's right wheels on the band that marks the edge of the inner lane. These are often ribbed, to make a noise and alert sleepy drivers that they are heading off the road. Le routier then steers by ear, keeping the sound of the band constant. He is free to put his feet up and watch a DVD, play a video-game or read a book. This might sound like urban legend or a media fantasy, but read on.

Drivers partly confirmed the reports on France-Inter, the main public radio, this morning. "I have seen guys reading while driving but I don't know about video games. That would seem a bit difficult to do," said a routier called Jean-Maurice on the A13 Paris-Normandy motorway. Another, called Olivier, said that driving with feet on the dashboard was becoming common now that trucks were so automated.

Another practice is upsetting the maintenance workers: drivers who avoid pit stops by urinating into bottles and throwing them out the window. "We are picking up big quantities of bottles of urine from the ditches," Romain Fronteau, boss of the Cofiroute motorway company on the A28 and A10 north of Tours, told le Figaro. A driver admitted on France-Inter that he regularly used the technique. "I throw mine out onto the grass," he said.

The autoroute companies are understandably alarmed over the danger to their personnel. About 15 people a year are killed on the highway hard shoulder (emergency lane) and maintenance crews are suffering frightening close shaves as trucks ride the dividing line. "The last time, the wheel nuts of a passing 38-tonner ripped open one of our service vehicles like a sardine can," said Jean-Michel Perrin, a highway manager at Saint-Arnoult, a big junction just south of Paris. Jacques Boussuge, Safety director for the association of French autoroute operators, told le Figaro that the group wanted new penalties for these new types of dangerous driving.

President Sarkozy's government has reacted quickly, ordering a police to put truck drivers under surveillance from Monday. "The statistics show that trucks are becoming less involved in road accidents," Dominique Bussereau, the Transport Minister, said. "However if there is reckless behaviour, such as reading the newspaper or watching television while driving, we will have to be very severe."   

The Fédération Nationale de transports routiers is depicting the reports as a scare story. "These are isolated acts", a spokesman said. The drivers are also of course also blaming foreign truckers, who account for much of the long-distance traffic in France.

French lorry drivers no longer benefit from the kindly image that they enjoyed in the mid-1970s when they were given a slogan by a programme on RTL radio: Les Routiers Sont Sympas  (Truckers are nice guys). Nearly a million listeners -- many of them truckers -- tuned in every night for a decade from 1972 to hear Max Meynier celebrate their life on the road. 

Below, Meynier's 1975 hit theme, Les Routiers, by Vladimir Cosma, one of France's biggest living composers, and Toots Thielemans, the Belgian jazz harmonica legend

[Below, the late Yves Montand hymns an earlier generation of French truckers. He played one in his most famous film, le Salaire de la Peur, 1953, directed by Georges-Henri Clouzot.]

Comments

[dot king]

This is really scary. I'd heard it on Inter yesterday and then seen it on Fr2 news yesterday evening. It might be a minority of routiers, they can say what they like, but the mentality of this minority is terrifying. Some of them had portable computers and video games and even an X-box on the dashboard. And if they're saying that it's mostly foreign drivers, then there was at least one interviewed on the TV news who admitted to doing it and said it was common enough practice - and he was French. He also said that they often used the "bande d'urgence" in order to be safer.

On the urinating side of things - French men consider it normal not to use toilets (perhaps not quite the same for Parisian bobos, but in La France Profonde . . .)
I live on a square that is open to the south with a stunning view as far as the Pyrénées.
One Sunday morning, I was outside watering the flowers, when a coach pulled in and stopped on the other side of the square. It was registered 40, so at the very least it had driven through remote countryside, roads bordered with hedges, ditches, paths into woods and fields, for at least 50 (give or take) minutes, since that is the nearest point to me from département 40. And they had probably, in reality, driven much further and Les Landes affords plenty of "rural pit-stop" opportunities.
Enfin bref, said coach disgorged its occupants on to the square, everyone endimanché, the women stood in a tight circle (I half-expected them to dance around their handbags), while the men lined up against the southern edge of the square and peed in unison, as one man, to their bladder's content whilst enjoying a splendid view.
They then zippered up and climbed aboard the coach again, and off it went. As far, I understood later, as the restaurant in the next village - 8km away.
They had been just by the village hall where the toilets are always open for public use.
There's no reasoning with a Frenchman and his bladder!
If anyone would like to join my up-to-now-one-woman protest against this, then all you have to do is: each time you drive by a man peeing en plein air, al fresco to boot, lean on the horn. He will be momentarily distracted and at the very least will pee on his shoes, if not his trousers. Yessss!! ; )

[azloon]

Dot

now wer're really 'getting down' on the blog: urinating in public. right on!! a topic we all can relate to.

i've always said, never live anywhere where you can't pee in your own yard, unobserved. i have that luxury at my house, so gardending/yard work doesn't require trips back into the house. just another one of the advantages of living in 'the wide open spaces' of the western u.s.

yes, horn honking would scare the shit out of most peeing men, if delivered at precisely the proper moment. the pants, rather than the shoes, would be the likely spot of misdirection (shoes get it even in ideal circumstances).

best public peeing scene i've ever personally witnessed: octoberfest in munich, 1969. a woefully inadequate number of portable toilets behind the lowenbrau tent lead to thousands of men simply stepping out behind the tent and letting go into the cold october night. the odor was enough to gag a horse. the huge cloud of vaporous urine wafting into the starlit sky was a sight to behold -- surreal, especially in my wildly intoxicated state.

p.s. more to the point: american truckers have been wathcing satellite tv, playing vido games, popping dexedrine, etc for years. howver, in most of these cases, the truck cabins are huge, with beds, toilets, even showers, and, more importantly, many drivers are accompanied by a second driver, often their wife or girlfriend (so they don't have to stop on long u.s. routes). those tinted windows conceal a multitude of sins.

i suggest that in the absence of toilets on french trucks/lorries that sarko, for his next revolutionary decree, require truckers to adopt the NASA diaper (nappy?) strategy.

[Terry]

Damn!

Azloon beat me to the astronaut diaper's comment.

Interesting blog. I WAS thinking about renting a car to go out to the countryside in April. Maybe, I will pass.

In the US, there are load restrictions on trucks. And, more importantly, regulations on how long a trucker can drive without sleeping. (10 hours a day, I think). Are there such restrictions in France?

Here's some appropriate music and video for the blog. Just imagine bottles flying from the trucks with it. Turn that sound on.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=xdc0Oq1VwH4

[Lily]

I have just told my husband about this article who could relate to it and explained to me that this was only natural. The male always want to mark their territory. Public toilets don’t meet that natural need.

The bottle-out-of-the-window version seems quite hazardous. It wouldn’t be very precise at marking the territory.

Dot’s idea of giving men a little more attention has never occurred to me. I always politely look away but it is true that I hardly ever drive anywhere without seeing a man who does “it”. I usually have pity of these men, consider bladder or prostate problems. We shouldn’t mock those.

Other than this, this is all very unpleasant. I expect truck driver’s ‘predictable’ behaviour on the ‘autoroute’. Now it is clear, that they (some or many of them) ARE as distracted as they often appear. I don’t trust their common sense driving anymore. This article might save lives.

[Daniel Strohl]

Terry,

"I WAS thinking about renting a car to go out to the countryside in April."

Terry, I think that this actually IS a good idea. However, you should know that a great majority of French or European cars have MANUAL gear boxes (this is true also for most rented cars) instead of automatic ones.

Therefore, if you are not used to switch gears manually, you should rent a car with automatic switching.

PS : I remember having hired a car at the San Francisco airport. It had of course automatic switching. But I discovered this only after the clerk from the renting company had gone back to his office. Therefore, I asked a by-stander to explain me how the thing worked. He was very obliging, but I could see that he was baffled; may be he took me for a camouflaged alien, speaking a strange American !

[Terry]

Daniel:

Thanks for the warning. I drive manual.

Any place where I can buy empty plastic bottles?

[Daniel Strohl]

Lily,

"I don’t trust their common sense driving anymore"

I have NEVER trusted them - when I was in activity, I used to drive often long distances, mostly in France and also in Germany.

Since the traffic was usually very heavy in Germany on crowded Autobahn(s), truck drivers there had the bad habit to overtake slower trucks almost without no prior notice (blinker) or much too late notice.

In France, it was somewhat safer, probably not because French truckers were much more virtuous, but simply because the "autoroutes" were broader and less crowded (at that time).

Terry,

"Are there such restrictions in France?"

Yes, there are. On all long range trucks, there are graphic recorders whose records can be used by police to control the actual drive time as well as the speed.

PS : on TV this evening, there was a real horror story : the police has stopped and arrested a (French) truck driver who was speeding at 140 kmh (87 mph or 76 knots, i.e possibly faster than Charles's Robin plane!) on the autoroute with a heavy truck!

He explained to the police that he had managed to disable the speed limiting system using two simple magnets ! Let us hope that the truck manufacturer will improve his speed limiter ...

Police said also that the man was under drug influence.

[Daniel Strohl]

Azloon,

"those tinted windows conceal a multitude of sins".

!!!!

[Paula]

I have done a lot of long distance driving in Australia and had some near misses with kangaroos, in fact invariably there are dead kangaroos on the side of highways, but I've never been struck, or indeed threatened, by flying bottles.

Given the long stretches across the country, there are excellent regular stop-overs and gas stations servicing truckies' needs...and remember that in Australia there are a number of female as well as male truckies.
They're nice people, who, when the highway narrows, or if the weather is bad, will signal to motorists when to pass and where to go.

Hopefully they restrict their video viewing to when they pull over.

PS. All hire cars here are automatic.

PPS. Tourist coaches stop at regular intervals at service- stations, not at somebody's garden.

[rockinred]

Why all the prissiness about al fresco peeing? It's just Anglo uptightness. Regarding the bottle thing, my pa flew in RAF bombers in WW2; essential kit on a raid included a length of rubber tube and a hot water bottle...

[dot king]

Lily "I always politely look away but it is true that I hardly ever drive anywhere without seeing a man who does “it”. I usually have pity of these men, consider bladder or prostate problems. We shouldn’t mock those."
Why should YOU look politely away when men are peeing in public? It is against the law, you should honk as a (possibly polite) reminder of their non-civic and uncivil behaviour.
And come on, Lily, ALL the men in France can't be bladder or prostrate sufferers!

[dot king]

Paula: it wouldn't matter if the coach stopped at a tourist station in France - the men would still pee into anything but a toilet.
This very morning whilst walking my dog I came across an elderly man standing apparently staring at a wall - in a village street.
"It can't be" quoth I to myself, but Yes! The old geezer was indeed peeing up against a wall across the road from his house - and in the pouring rain what's more!
I couldn't honk, being on foot, so I waited until I was close enough for a LOUD COUGH to register the same effect! I think it gave him a difficult moment with his zip - but I graciously lowered my umbrella and continued my route, but a satisfactory level of muttering could be heard.
Come on you Monstrous Regimens, join forces with me in the campaign!
Remember a HONK or a COUGH are all it takes! ;0

[dot king]

Terry "Any place where I can buy empty plastic bottles?"

As everyone who blogs here has probably gathered, France Inter is always playing during the day at my house. An excellent daily science programme called "La tête au carréé" featured, a couple of days ago, a very specialised doctor who at one point said that he often saw men with their (how to get this past Charles' hawk-eyed Mr Moderator?) hmm "private accoutrements" stuck in bottles, and that the only recourse was often - erm amputation.
You have been warned - I tell you this for your own good.
I'm all heart! :)

[Rocket]

Dot

"..often saw men with their (how to get this past Charles' hawk-eyed Mr Moderator?) hmm "private accoutrements" stuck in bottles,"

If the "private accoutrement gets stuck in a bottle I think you could safely refer to it as a "noodle" without Charles moderating your comment.

[dot king]

Rocket: "If the "private accoutrement gets stuck in a bottle I think you could safely refer to it as a "noodle" without Charles moderating your comment."

Perhaps I should clarify that the "accoutrements" in question in the programme were in a "certain indelicate condition" - one never knows one's eventual needs on a long journey;
Oh dear, I blush, I blush . . .

[azloon]

it's not only men who pee in 'non-designated locations.'

when i lived briefly at 10 Rue Danoux(?) near the sorbonne in 1968, on the top floor of a seedy student hotel (it's now a stylish boutique hotel), i would often wake in the night and peer down to the street five floors below where, frequently, i would observe 'bag ladies' squatting in the gutter to 'do their thing." up to that point, i had never seen a female relieve herself in public, albeit late at night. no, Dot, i didn't honk at her, or cough. poor soul.

[Lily]

"And come on, Lily, ALL the men in France can't be bladder or prostrate sufferers!" (Dot)

You are right. I learnt that here. Thank you. Although - the thought of maybe honking at just the one in a thousand sufferers - might still hold me back...

[dot king]

Azloon, I appreciate your delicacy in this matter, you of course did exactly right - I speak not of poor souls or bag ladies. Said lady probably had no choice and Paris streets are scrupulously cleaned every morning (as I understand it). I regard that as being quite different from (say) the people who often park their campers on "my" square, big luxury things often, and use their ("my") surroundings for "calls of nature". There is a path down the cliff (signposted as a "sentier botanique" which these "civilised holidaymakers" use for throwing their excrement, or I've even come across the well-heeled and properly-equipped counterpart of your bag lady, squatting beside the cliff path before driving off in the huge camper.
If only we could prove that they played X-box whilst driving, we'd even be back on topic!
PS of all "events" that a village could organise, ours has decided on a camping-car meeting. One morning I opened my balcony shutters and could count 36 huge campers on the square. Each with TV aerial and satellite dish - also interior wc and shower - the mayor assured me. In the village as a whole, there wee 200. We are approximately 1200 souls.
My dog gets a late night walk, so I made a point of letting him pee against the camper-vans (I usually make him wait until he's where no-one walks) because their owners were peeing willy-nilly (as 'twere) in our environment. There's no need, it's a lack of civisme.
BTW - I mentioned this as a humorous aside really; I really do honk and/or cough, but I'm always laughing at the ignorant sods.

[dot king]

I note a Freuedian slip in my last post "there wee 200" should of course read "there were 200" !

[Mads]

Yeh, go for it Dot!! I notice that the three English men that live in our area have all adopted the French method, so to speak.

Round here (deep in the bleak but to me beautiful Auvergne) our problem isn't so much truck drivers with videos but tractor drivers with very loud radios or CD players in the cabs. They can't hear you on the road and seem to use their mirrors to make sure that you are still behind them! That said, some do pull over and wave - if they know you or recognise the car.

It can be an eerie experience working or lazing in the garden to hear voices or singing coming from apparent thin air, when in fact it is someone working in a field over the hill!

[john o'doe]

The most amazing detail I heard about is that the trucks are fitted with forward proximity radar that automatically applies the brakes if they get too close to the vehicle in front, usually another truck. This explains why the driver no longer needs to keep an eye on the road in front and can concentrate on other activities such as pissing into a plastic bottle while playing video games and posting comments on blogs.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Frenchmen have always been rather scornful about the Anglo Saxon squeamishness when they witnesss public peeing. Proud, indeed of their ability to do so without giving offence to passing ladies. Andre Gide records, in his journals, the instance of a Gendarme in Paris tapping a man on the shoulder with his truncheon and telling him to move closer to the wall, which ellicited the reply: "Do you want me to skin myself?"

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

In juxtaposition, to show how the law works on the other side of the Channel: A 19th century law allowed a gentleman to urinate on the rear offside wheel of a stationary carriage, and call for "Cape" from a Peeler to shield the sight from a passing lady. A journalist, testing this out in the 60's was threatened with arrest: it is strictly against the law in the United Kingdom. In the 1950's a coal-miner, told he was under arrest for urinating in a shop doorway in Gateshead, Co. Durham, responded to the Police Constable (read out in court): "Divvent ye worry, hinny. You've got big boots on. You won't get splashed." He was fined £1, the price of 14 pints of beer at that time.

[Ros]

"The next time you overtake a big truck on a French highway, try to see if the driver is watching television with his feet up on the dashboard." Sorry, Charles, but doing this while passing a lorry would be much too dangerous for myself!

[azloon]

CB --

are you biting your tongue about the propective marriate of the president?

don't give in to the high-minded?

don't forget the bottom-feeders.

[I did it for the newspaper yesterday. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3141113.ece and there will be plenty more Sarko tomorrow with his two-hour news conference. A post on his son also coming up. CB]

[Terry]

A lot of truck drivers call in on Rush Limbaugh, a radio talk show host.

Does France have talk radio? I know that salespeople and truck drivers that have to be in their cars all day listen to talk radio because it's more engaging than the music radio.

In fact, many airline pilots listen to talk radio.

[Marguerite.]

Le coup de faire pipi dans une bouteille quand on conduit, c'est pratique. J'y avais deja pense mais quand on est une femme, ce n'est pas commode.

[Ros]

Quite off-thread, Charles, but don't waste time or you'll miss Sarko's wedding! http://www.lejdd.fr/cmc/politique/20081/sarkozy-bruni-mariage-imminent_83915.html

[Ros]

Apologies for my post of a few minutes ago - I hadn't yet read your article -----

[SHEILS]

Marguerite, someone has invented practical solutions for all problems. Do a google for the amazing Shewee!

[mcspode]

Rockinred, Are you saying that in WW2 crews on bombing missions were too prudish to throw a bottle of piss out the window, and brought them home?

[peter Mason]

Re Peter Kinseley's 19th century UK legislation permitting urination on a vehicle wheel, this supposedly is still in force but unfortunately for that 1960's journalist it only applies to licensed cab drivers and may only apply in London. You won't find many cabbies invoking it as the 'Peelers' likely response will be '...and then you can produce the horse fodder, spare harness and harness-makers tools required to be carried on your cab under the same legislation'!

As for there being a strict ban, back in the 50's perhaps. Fellow students regularly used the side wall of the local library as a urinal in the 70's, although admittedly they thought it was the local police station. As for commuter stations, the two I've commuted to daily for about two plus years both have areas of platform all regular passengers avoid because of the urine puddles. The current station I use has a huge area of platform that is permanently urine stained and I've seen middle-aged men relieving themselves despite it being early evening rush hour with youngish schoolkids standing around. Post-privatisation the station staff are more concerned with revenue protection than enforcing byelaws and the police take the sensible view that a day in the magistrates court prosecuting an offence carrying a few pounds fine is a waste of resources.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

The journalist in the 60's who splashed the rear offside wheel of a stationary vehicle was really out to antagonize the two young Bobbies on duty at the Hampstead Heath Fair as he had a low opinion of the intelligence of the entire Force. His brother, a keen shot with his 12-bore (rabbits, hare, pigeon) had recently applied to his local police HQ in Yorkshire for a Black Powder Licence, to enable him to make his own ammunition, and was visited at his home by two C.I.D. officers, sent by the Superintendent to "check him out". He offered them tea, and one asked him what he thought of Enoch Powell's speech claiming rivers of blood would flow as a result of the mass of coloured immigrants entering Great Britain.
"Enoch? He knows what he's talking about -- it'll probably come true some day." he called, and went into the kitchen.
As he put the kettle on, he heard one say to the other: "There you are -- I knew he was nothing to do with Black Power."