Campaign to Bring Back Trees to France's Rural Roads

For tourists, they are part of the fabric of France - tree-lined avenues throwing dappled shade on to country lanes. For local authorities, they are a menace. Over the past 30 years they have felled thousands of maples, planes and poplars because of fears that they distract drivers and cause accidents.

But the policy may be about to change. A government crackdown on drink-driving and speeding cut the carnage on French roads by almost 20% last year, leading campaigners to argue that booze rather than bark is the real problem.

"People are at last realising that the trees are not what cause these deaths," said Chantal Fauché, of Arbres et Routes, a tree-protection group in the southern Gers region, where some of the worst felling has happened.

"It's drinking and speeding that are the real problems. If you tackle them, the deaths drop."

About 750 people a year are killed on tree-lined rural roads. The writer Albert Camus died in 1960 when he drove into a tree.

In 2001 a study suggested that road deaths in France would be halved if fixed objects were removed from roadsides. Barely 400,000 so-called arbres d'alignement are left today, compared with 3m a century ago.

But Ms Fauché argues the decades of felling did nothing to reduce road deaths.

The recent government regulations - reducing speed limits, tightening speed and breathalyser checks and increasing penalties - have had an almost instant effect.

Ms Fauché has always argued that trees can help drivers to gauge their speed. She has faced death threats in the past and aggression from local communities. But now that drivers are slowing down and avoiding alcohol, her campaign is beginning to win support.

Ms Fauché founded her group when she noticed trees were disappearing in 1996. Five years later she convinced regional authorities not to chop down 120 trees.

In Gers, where roads are lined with stumps, they have promised to replant 10,000 trees over the next 10 years, set further back from the road for safety.