Cars With Maks

I went up a mountain today. Came back down it too, which is generally considered the more important half of that plan, and for about ten minutes this afternoon it was genuinely in doubt, thanks to a French registration plate and a phone screen that apparently mattered more than the actual road.

I want to be upfront about my own biases here, because it will make the rest of this make more sense. I don’t get on with French drivers. This isn’t a new position, it’s a well established, long running one, and I suspect it’s shared by roughly every other European who’s ever been stuck behind one on a road that has better things to be doing than hosting a rolling road block. So when I pulled out behind a French car on the descent, some small, tired part of me already knew, with the grim certainty of a man who’s seen this film before, exactly what was coming.

Sixty in a Ninety

The road home has a limit of 90. Sensible mountain road speed, fast enough to actually get somewhere, slow enough that the various hairpins don’t try to kill you. The car in front of me had apparently decided, unilaterally, that 60 was the correct interpretation of this number. Not because of the road, which was clear, dry, and entirely reasonable. Not because of traffic, of which there was none. Just, as far as I could tell, because the driver had stopped paying attention to the actual job of driving somewhere around the second hairpin and had transferred his full attention to something rectangular and glowing in his lap.

Thirty kilometres an hour under the limit, on an open mountain road, is its own special kind of hazard. It’s not safe driving. It looks like safe driving from the outside, slow and cautious, but it isn’t, because a car moving significantly slower than the traffic flow and the road design around it becomes a moving obstacle that everyone else now has to solve for. You end up with faster traffic bunching up behind, looking for gaps that shouldn’t need to exist, on a road that was perfectly safe until one driver decided the number on the sign was more of a suggestion than an instruction, and a loose one at that.

Then It Got Actually Dangerous

The slow bit, annoying as it was, I could have lived with. What I couldn’t live with, and what actually got my heart rate up in a way a mountain descent shouldn’t, was what happened next. Twice, on a section with a solid line and genuinely blind corners, the car ahead drifted lazily across into the oncoming lane. Not a controlled, deliberate overtake. A slow, aimless wander, the kind of movement a car makes when the person steering it has, for a few seconds, stopped actually steering it and started doing something else entirely with his attention. I never got a clean look at what, but on a road with a phone signal, a driver going 30kph under the limit, and a car that periodically forgets which lane it’s supposed to be in, I think we can all take an educated guess.

On a straight road, in flat countryside, that’s careless. On a mountain road, with blind crests and nothing but a painted line and mutual good faith standing between you and something coming the other way at 90, that’s the kind of moment where an entire family’s day could have ended very differently, for absolutely no reason at all except a notification that genuinely could have waited.

This Is Exactly the Thing I Keep Writing About

I’ve said before that drivers are getting worse, and I stand by it, but there’s a difference between reading that as an abstract complaint about modern life and actually sitting behind it on a blind hairpin with your hands gripping the wheel a little tighter than usual. The phone is the common thread every single time. Not bad reflexes, not bad weather, not an unfamiliar road. Just attention, quietly and repeatedly handed over to a screen, on a stretch of tarmac that genuinely does not forgive that kind of thing.

I don’t actually think this is a French problem, whatever my running grudge might suggest. I think it’s an everyone problem, and the French driver I was stuck behind today just happened to be the specific example the universe handed me on the way down a mountain. Give it another week and I’m sure someone else will provide the next one, in a different car, with a different plate, doing exactly the same thing.

Put the phone away. It genuinely isn’t that important. The mountain will still be there when you get home, and so, ideally, will everyone else on the road with you.