FRANCE: The Pace That Kills

In France, a nation of individualists, no one insists on his individualism more than the French motorist. Only a few small towns have speed limits. A motorist may speed down Paris’ famed Champs Elysées at 60 miles an hour, if he wants to (and often does). Result: France has over four times as many fatal traffic accidents per 100,000 drivers as the U.S. But even the French were startled last week by a statistic from one of the country’s largest insurance companies: one in eleven French drivers, in his lifetime, kills someone.