Drastic Times

Two Paris suburbs have suffered traffic chaos over a feud between their two mayors.

According to a BBC News article, the conservative mayor of Levallois-Perret decided to make the busy route D909 one-way to reduce the amount of commuter traffic through his district. He took this step without consulting with the other communities through which the D909 passed.

The Socialist mayor of neighbouring Clichy-la-Garenne said this increased congestion in his area. So instead of discussing the problem with Levallois-Perret's mayor, or considering if it would be beneficial to make his section of the route one-way in the same direction, he chose to make his section one-way in the opposite direction.

With the contradictory road-signs in place, the unsurprising result was gridlock, prompting the deployment of municipal and national police to direct traffic away from the area.

Personally I'm glad to see that the French can be just as disagreeable with each other as they can be with foreigners.

In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense and one of the chief engineers of the Iraqi War, "If you can't solve a problem, enlarge it." This strategy worked equally well in the Parisian suburbs as it did in Iraq.