WATCH THIS before driving in France!

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In this video, I break down France’s most confusing driving rule – “priorité à droite” (priority to the right) – that every foreign driver must understand before hitting French roads. After 17 years of living in France and navigating thousands of intersections, I still find this rule challenging, which is why I’ve created this essential tutorial for expats, travelers, and anyone planning to drive in France. I’ll show you exactly how priorité à droite works, the crucial road signs to recognize instantly, real-world examples from my drives and bike rides in Dijon, and provide a practical quiz to test your knowledge. Whether you’re moving abroad, already living as an expat, or planning a French road trip, mastering this counterintuitive traffic rule is essential for safe and confident driving in France and other European countries.

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CHAPTERS:
01:21 What is priorité à droite, the French driving rule?
03:11 Important French road signs to know
09:40 How do I know if an intersection is priorité à droite?
14:47 Is right on red allowed in France?
15:36 Am I ready to drive in France? Take the Quiz!

#PrioritéÀDroite #DrivingInFrance #FrenchDrivingRules #ExpatLife #FranceTravel #EuropeanDriving #RoadRulesFrance #MovingToFrance #FrenchRoads #ExpatTips #FrenchCulture #AmericanInFrance #CulturalAdaptation #ExpatsInFrance #LifeAbroad

Priority, giving priority to traffic coming from the right. This is the rule that catches foreigners offg guard in France that you absolutely must know before you take to the roads here. I’ve lived in France for 17 years and have had to develop a critical reflex here when driving and when riding my bike. But even after getting my French driver’s license and navigating thousands of intersections, this rule still catches me off guard sometimes. Whether you’re considering a move abroad, already an expat, or just considering a road trip through France, understanding priority to the right, or priorat is essential, this sometimes counterintuitive rule affects many intersections you’ll encounter, and I’ll explain exactly what you need to know to drive safely and confidently here in France. In this video, I’ll break down exactly how the priority dee adat rule works, show you the crucial road signs you need to recognize instantly, share tips for developing the right reflexes, and test your knowledge with a quiz to ensure that you’re fully prepared before hitting the roads in France. But before we get started, just a quick reminder that you can click on the link in the video description below to sign up for my email list, which will give you more practical information about life in France delivered directly to your email inbox. Driving in France can be tricky at times. Most of the time I use my bike to get around, but still applies. Basically, priorat means that you must yield to any vehicle coming from your right regardless of which road appears to be the main road. Here’s an example. I’m driving east on Muzar, approaching the intersection with Ruda. You notice there’s a little side street on my right. That’s frat and it’s not even very visible from inside the car. If someone were coming out of that street, I would have to yield to them because they would be on my right. Here are two other shots of the intersection to give you other views. You can see how I slow down to see what’s happening on my right for this reason. Here’s an example of an awkward priority moment that I managed to capture downtown. That little street on my rightas is a priority. And when I passed by on my bike, it was uneventful. I slowed down, took a look. No one was coming, so I just continued on my way straight down the street I was on. But look what I captured just seconds before. The gray Gulf stops and lets two cars go. The first car, the Renault, is just going very slowly. And the black car behind it, seems to lose patience and tries to, I don’t know, pass on the right. The whole thing is very confusing. Plus, there’s pedestrians, a bike. It’s just chaotic and I think dangerous. This is why we just have to be careful and calm and attentive and just be very observant about what’s happening all around us when we’re on the road. So while porat might be counterintuitive when you are at an intersection where it applies many of the intersections will look familiar to you. At many intersections you’ll see a stop sign a yield sign or there will be traffic lights or a roundabout and in those cases priority does not apply. But you might encounter road signs in France that you’re not familiar with. For example this one. And this one indicates that if you continue along the same road that you’re on, the next intersection that you encounter will be one of these tricky prior intersections. Which means that you should probably slow down, be very careful, and look and see what’s happening and see if there is anyone emerging from the next road on your right because if there is someone, then you need to yield to them because they have the right of way. It’s a very useful sign. Unfortunately, they don’t systematically put this sign before each of these priority intersections. So, while it’s good to know it and be aware and looking out for it, you also have to look for other things because this sign is not the only indication that the next intersection you encounter is going to be a priority. So to come back to our example from before, as I was approaching Fratern This sign was not posted. So, how did I know that the next intersection was going to be prior? In fact, there was nothing. There were no traffic signs. There were no indications. And the fact that there was nothing tells me that the next intersection is a priority. Relevant negatives, if you will. This is an idea we’ll come back to in a minute. Okay. So, here is a real life example of this sign. So, I’m on my bike and I’m approaching an intersection and I see the first one of these signs and then there is even a second one and it looks like it’s wired maybe to blink, but as you can see here when I passed it wasn’t blinking. It’s a good example because you can see how I slowed down to let the car on my right go. So, the sign gave me a warning. I was careful. I let the car go and I navigated the intersection safely. The signs did their job effectively and as intended. Now, we’re going to watch two more examples of cars trying to navigate this intersection. I got off my bike just to film for a minute, just to try to capture some footage to share with you because I know that this intersection is quite tricky. In the first example, we see what is supposed to happen here. These two gray cars have stopped to let the two black cars go. I didn’t start filming quite quickly enough, but you get the idea. Okay, same intersection. Third example. Look what happens now. The white car, which just saw the same two signs as it approached, should have let the gray car on the right go. But the gray car might be hard to see. There’s a fence, some poles, there’s a lot going on. A second white car goes by, and finally the little navy blue car lets the gray car on the right go. This is not at all how this should have gone down. But because the gray car slowed down so much, basically stopping, the first car may have been confused. Maybe the white car thought that the gray car had a stop or a yield. Or maybe the white car thought the gray car was just letting them go. In any case, confusion ensues, which I do not like. Sometimes there may even be a second sign below the sign with the actual words written on it, which is probably meant to improve visibility. I don’t think it’s a big improvement really. Also, especially because we can’t count on these signs being systematically placed before each of these intersections, but maybe it helps a little bit to warn road users that one of these tricky intersections is coming up. Another road sign that you may encounter looks like this. Any clue what this might mean? This is prior punctual, which means that you have one time priority at the next intersection. So, vehicles coming from other roads must yield to you at the next intersection. I found this example on Wikipedia, but no examples when I was out and about in town. This example is confusing to me, too, because I see in the distance that there’s a sign for a roundabout, and I know that I will have to yield to the traffic in the roundabout. So, where is the road that I have priority over between where I am now and the roundabout? I can’t see it. It’s not very visible. So, in this case, if I were the driver, I would just be very careful as I approach the roundabout. My husband did spot one of these signs when he was driving out in the country recently. So, perhaps these signs are just more frequently located in the country as opposed to in town. And there are two other signs that you might see. For example, this one. Can you guess what it means? This one indicates that you’re on a root prior or a priority road, meaning no stops, yields, or prior for you on this road for the moment. Here’s one my husband spotted in the country recently. This one tells you that the road that you’re on is no longer a rude prior and probably indicates that an intersection is coming up and that you have to be very careful. They’re not so common in town, but I did spot this one. When driving in France, there are things that you can look for that will explicitly instruct you in your driving. As you approach an intersection, you can look for signs for yourself, and you can also look to see if there are signs indicated for the people on the roads that are approaching that are intersecting with the road that you’re on. You can also look for lines or symbols that are painted on the street. These are called marage osul. A continuous white line painted on the ground means stop for the person who is approaching the white line. In this example, you can see the white line painted on the ground. And you can also see the stop sign for the person in the gray car here. It’s visible for the gray car, but it’s also visible for us as we approach the intersection. Here is a second example of a similar situation where we’re driving along and the person on our right has a stop sign, but here it’s less visible because the maka, the line on the ground, has faded and the stop sign is turned in a way that it’s difficult for us to see it. So, we just have to be very observant and look for clues like this as we approach this type of intersection because imagine if it were at night or if there were snow on the street, it would be harder for us to observe the clues that we have. And if visibility is an issue, then we might mistakenly think that this is a priority intersection, which is okay. Just means that we’ll probably slow down and be very observant and very careful and look for traffic coming from the right. But again, it can be confusing depending on the situation. And a painted white line like this on the street indicates that the road user that’s approaching the dotted line needs to yield to the other road users. Normally, there’s also a yield sign posted at these intersections. But again, if you’re going straight on the road and you have an intersecting street on the right, sometimes it’s difficult for you to see whether or not the person coming from the right has a yield sign. Sometimes the sign itself is not visible and that’s why you can look down on the road to see if you can detect the dotted lines on the road which would indicate that they need to yield as well. It’s a second visual clue for you that indicates what the intersecting street users are supposed to be doing. But sometimes you just don’t have all of these visual clues at an intersection as you approach. So here’s the really tricky part. Sometimes you have to think of driving on French roads as a game with hidden rules. If you don’t see any lines on the ground or signs anywhere for yourself or for the oncoming traffic, that’s also really important information. It’s like a relevant negative in medicine. What is a relevant negative? Imagine you’re a doctor trying to diagnose your patient. You’re going to ask your patient a series of questions about their symptoms. And the absence of certain symptoms is actually important information for you in your diagnostic process. For example, if your patient has a fever, that’s important information for you to have. But if your patient doesn’t have a fever, that’s also important information for you to have to help you rule out certain diagnosis. So, back to French roads, the absence of road signs and the absence of lines painted on the road is important information that’s going to help you as the road user decide what to do in certain situations. In fact, in the absence of marage osul or any road signs, you’re probably in a priority situation, which means that you need to be very careful and observant about what’s happening on the right. And if there is traffic coming from your right, then you need to give them the priority and yield to that traffic. So remember, in France, things that you don’t see can be just as important as things that you do see. This is a tip I got from my driving instructor when I had to repass my driver’s license here in France, but that is a story for another day. Again, it is possible to mistakenly think that you are in a pre-ordat situation based on visibility issues if the Mac or the paint on the street is not clear or if you don’t see the stop sign in the or the yield sign that the intersecting road user has or for other reasons like I mentioned before, snow or nighttime for example. So again, it can lead to confusion. So, it’s just something to be aware of and to be very careful of. And remember, this rule applies to all road users, people driving cars, on motorcycles, and even on bicycles. Here’s an example of me on my bike first showing you the intersection when I’m going through it alone. It is a priorat, which you can see because there are no lines on the ground and there are no signs. There is a crosswalk, but there’s no yield or stop sign. And then when we were filming from another angle, I did have to interact with a car, so I slowed down. I stopped. in fact and I let the car go because they had priority and then I continued on. Priority can seem particularly tricky to me when I feel like I’m on the main street and it seems even subconsciously it seems like the little intersecting streets on the right hand side are secondary and sometimes I just sort of forget to keep this rule in mind and to remember and that I need to be checking on my right all at all times. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I’m driving north on Rul Joan in Djon and there are six side streets that intersect with this road and they’re all priority. Let’s pretend you’re in the car with me and we’re driving north on Odul. So, we’re just driving straight, right? And it seems illogical to me at times that we have to be careful for all of these little side streets on our right because we’re just going straight. And as these side streets intersect, the people have to either turn left or turn right. They don’t have the choice. So it seems logical to me that they would be the ones that would have to be super careful. And they do have to slow down and look both ways before they turn, obviously. But I also have to be I also have to remember that I have to give them adat at each of these intersections. And the other thing I tend to forget is that when someone is approaching one of these intersections on my left, it means that I am on their right and therefore have priority. Um, my instinct is to slow way down to navigate the intersection, which is a good instinct, I think. But again, the problem is that it can create confusion for the person on my left who is also slowing down and expects me to go because I am on their right. Here is an example. As I approached this intersection, if someone had been arriving at the same moment on my left, they would have had to let me go as I would have had priority through this intersection. Another thing to remember about these intersections is that they’re often in residential neighborhoods where the speed limit is 50 or 30 km an hour anyway. So, everyone should be driving cautiously in any case. But the locals, the people who live in that neighborhood, believe me, they know exactly where the priority intersections are. And you might not be familiar with the neighborhood, but they know. And so oftentimes I find them a little bit overly enthusiastic about asserting their priority um forcing the passage as they say in French. So just be on the lookout for that as well. The other thing I wanted to mention is that I think this rule applies in all other European countries where people drive on the right side of the road. So just make sure to familiarize yourself with the road rules of any country in which you’ll be driving. And one other driving rule that I wanted to mention just because it’s so different from in the states is that here in France there is no right turn on red. So if you arrive at an intersection and you have a red light and your intention is to turn right, you cannot turn even after stopping and checking to make sure the coast is clear. You just have to wait until the light turns green. However, if you arrive at the same intersection, but you’re on your bicycle, you will see that right underneath the traffic light, there’s a little yield sign, a very small one, with a little bicycle on it and an arrow pointing to the right. And this little sign indicates that you, a cyclist, as a cyclist, you are allowed, in fact, to turn right on red. So, you need to check and make sure that the coast is clear, but once you’ve done that, it is safe for you to turn right. So in this case, there are different rules for different types of road users. Okay. So now that you know these rules, it is time for a quiz. We will see if you remember the road signs and if you remember what to do in different tricky situations. You can use this quiz to see if you are ready to take to the roads in France. Question number one, what does this sign mean? Technically, it means that you are on a route prior and that people arriving from intersecting roads have to give you the priority, but I would not let my guard down. I think it’s too easy to miss the sign that indicates that this is over and so I would just stay alert and be careful at every intersection nonetheless. Question number two, what does this sign mean and what should you do if you see it? It means that the road that you’re on no longer has the priority. And in this case, you can see they also indicate that you’re approaching a roundabout. So, you’re going to have to yield at the next intersection. In any case, if you see the sign, it means that you need to beware. Next, what does this sign mean? And what does it mean that I have to do at the next intersection? It means that at the next intersection, which is in fact at the exact spot where the sign is posted, I do not have the priority and I need to yield to traffic that’s coming from my right. Question number four. What does it mean for the next intersection immediately after having just seen this sign? It means that at the next intersection, I have the priority and the other people arriving from intersecting streets will have a stop, a yield, or a light. Question number five, what do you need to do at the next intersection and how do you know? You can continue driving on the street and you do not need to give priority to the person arriving on your right. We can see here a barely visible marage osul and a yield sign which is also turned in a way that makes it quite difficult for us to see. Question number six, what do you need to do at this intersection and how do you know this is a priority intersection. So if someone is coming down the street on your right then you need to slow down and allow them to go. You need to yield to them. They may be going straight. They may be turning but they you need to let them go ahead of you. and Juno because of relevant negatives. There’s no maka joul. There’s nothing painted on the street. And while there is a street sign and a sign with information about parking, there is no stop sign and there is no yield sign. Question number seven, what do you need to do at this intersection and how do you know? In this case, if you’re driving straight down the street and you see someone approaching on your right, you shouldn’t worry too much about it because they have a stop sign which is indicated by the makage osul, the line on the ground which is a little bit faded in this case. And they also have a stop sign which is also a bit tricky to see but normally if you are continuing straight then you have the right of way and you should be able to continue on your way and the person approaching on your right should stop. Question number eight what do you need to do as you approach this intersection with the intention of going straight and how do you know? Another classic priority intersection. So, if someone were arriving on our right and we were going straight, then we would need to yield to them and let them turn in either direction um because they have the right of way. And the way that we know is again because of relevant negatives. There’s no makage osul, no lines painted on the street. And while there is a street sign indicating the name of the street, there’s no yield sign and there’s no stop sign. Question number nine. What do you need to do at this traffic light if you are approaching in a car and the light is red and you’re planning on turning right? In this case, you have to just stop and wait for the light to turn green. There is no right on red in France for cars. Question number 10. Same intersection, different circumstances. This time, as you approach the light, you see that it’s red and you intend to turn right, but this time you’re on your bicycle. What do you do this time? You can in fact turn right on red because you have a little yield sign with a bicycle and an arrow indicating that it’s okay for you to turn right on red once you have checked to make sure that it’s safe to do so. And that’s it. How did you do? I hope that you scored 10 out of 10. And if you did, I think that you’re ready to take to the roads here in France. And if not, you might want to come back and try the quiz again in a day or so to help you to develop this reflex that you need in order to be able to identify priority intersections quickly so that you can drive safely while you’re here in France. The intersections that I filmed for this video where there was confusion and hesitation and even slight chaos, um I honestly didn’t have to film for very long before those things happened. So, I think that it’s a perfect example and a clear indication of the fact that these intersections really are tricky to navigate, even for people who have developed the reflex over time to be checking for priority. So, please just be careful when you’re on the roads here. Also, one last reminder to sign up for my email list using the link in the video description below if you would like to receive more practical information about life in France delivered directly to your email inbox. And you can go ahead and check out some of these other videos on my channel about life in France. Until the next time, safe journeys or bunroot.