Several hundred bikers drove across
Paris on Saturday in a last-ditch protest against the introduction of lower
speed limits from July 1 on
France’s secondary roads, the most unpopular reform so far undertaken by President
Emmanuel Macron.
The maximum speed will drop to 80 kilometres (50 miles) per hour from 90 on the country’s 400,000 kilometres of secondary roads which do not have a central partition.
The government says that this will reduce road deaths - which last year totalled 3,684 - by 400 a year, and will let France resume the trend that lowered the number of road deaths by more than 80 percent since the 1970s.
The lower speeds will also be good for the environment as it will cut auto emissions by 30 percent, officials say.
But those arguments have failed to win over public opinion, and the measure has served to increase perceptions that Mr Macron is a lofty “president of the rich” out of touch with ordinary people, especially those in the country and smaller towns.
Opinion polls show 74 percent of respondents are against the move to lower road speeds on secondary roads. “It’s just a monstrous racket, they’re doing it to make money.
"It will annoy everybody, and will create traffic jams and accidents,” said Gilles, 59, one of the bikers who took part in Saturday's protest in Paris.
His view that the new speed limit is an easy way to fill state coffers with more speeding tickets is widely shared.
The centrist government "prefers tech-savvy city cyclists to country people driving diesels," Vincent Descoeur, an opposition Republicans MP, said in parliament earlier this month.
The government launched television and radio campaigns to try to quell motorists' anger, saying the new limits would add only a few minutes to most trips while cutting a driver's petrol costs by €120 euros a year.
A 10-kilometre trip, for example, would take 45 seconds longer, or just two minutes more for 25 kilometres, the ads said.
"The goal is not to p--- people off," Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said Friday, reiterating that he was ready "to live with being unpopular".
He said a similar reduction on the Paris “périphérique” - inner ring-road - a few years ago led to an 18 percent drop in accidents. He also has promised that any spike in speeding fines will be allocated to caring for car crash victims. The top speed limit on France’s motorways remains at 130 kilometres per hour.