Paris: No Sign of Stopping
The road sign not found in the French capital.
Whether you’re close to home or far away, it’ s always a little nerve-wracking to drive in a big city. Navigating the sea of cars, one-way streets and traffic lights can be stressful, even if you’re a seasoned city driver. Take Paris, for instance. The City of Lights is famous for its chaotic roads, including the Champs-Élysées, a massive eightlane thoroughfare without a median strip, and the Étoile, or star, an enormous roundabout circling the Arc de Triomphe that connects no fewer than 12 separate roads. Even cruising on the River Seine can be chaotic. You’d think stop signs would be a necessity – and yet the city doesn’t have a single one.
In Paris, cars don’t come to a full stop at any intersection without a traffic light. Cars on the right have the right of way, at both regular
intersect ions and on roundabouts. While there are plenty of traffic signs in Paris, red octagons are not among them.
Par is hasn’t always been a stop- sign- f ree metropolis, though. According to a Paris police report, the city did have a stop sign at one point. Yes, just one – a single red octagon reading ‘STOP’ stood at the exit of a construction facility. In case you’re wondering why a French sign said ‘stop’, stop is “considered a valid French word, borrowed from English.” Yes, the only stop sign in the city was basically at the exit of a glorified driveway.
It was situated on the Quai Saint-Exupéry, a riverside road in Paris’s 16th arrondissement (district). And despite this sign’s unique claim to fame, it seems that no one paid much attention to it – until it suddenly vanished. Sometime between May 2012 and September 2014, the
The sole stop sign in Paris before it mysteriously disappeared some years ago
stop sign disappeared right off the post that held it, and it hasn’t been returned. Whether it was an authorised removal or the work of a thief, we can only guess.
There may not be stop signs, but plenty of other signs keep the Parisian streets from devolving into chaos. One of the most common is the red circle with the line through it, meaning ‘Do Not Enter’ which indicates a one-way street. There are plenty of ‘No Left Turn’ signs as well, just like the one that stood next to the stop sign. Basically, if you ever find yourself behind the wheel in Paris, drive carefully.