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French driver confuses entrance to car park with Metro station... and gets a shock

The Local France
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French driver confuses entrance to car park with Metro station... and gets a shock
Photo: Twitter/@Letontonskol

When a French city's Metro station and a car park have the same name it's easy to get confused between the two, isn't it?

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It's not the first time and it certainly won't be the last.

A driver in the south western French city of Toulouse got a shock on Monday night when she realised what she thought was the entrance to an underground car park was actually the stairs down to the Metro station.

The driver, a woman aged in her 50s from the Landes department of the south west, had been looking for the entrance to the Jeanne-d'Arc car park but instead drove down into the Jeanne-d'Arc Metro station.

Images posted on Twitter showed the car stuck on the stairs with the two rear wheels in the air. It was the Toulouse transport authorities who first raised the alarm after spotting on CCTV the huge crowd of amused onlookers gathering at the station entrance.

Regional newspaper La Depeche reported that the shocked driver remained in the vehicle for several minutes until firefighters arrived at the scene.

Luckily for her no one was hurt in the incident and firefighters managed to pull her car out of the entrance without causing any damage. 

She can also console herself with the fact that she was not the only driver to have confused the entrance to an underground car park with a Metro station.

In 2014 The Local reported how motorist accidentally drove into a Metro station entrance on the Champs Elysées in Paris of all places.

The driver zipped off the busy Avenue Champs Elysees and drove onto the pavement towards what he believed was a car park, but it was only after making it down several stairs that he realized his mistake.

Driver takes wrong turn into Paris Metro station

Photos from the scene show onlookers laughing, some as they climbed past the car on their way out of the Metro.

Given that Paris has over 300 Metro stations and hundreds of thousands of drivers, run-ins between the two aren’t that rare. In April 2012 a 26-year-old man, who police determined was sober, also ran into some parking problems.

He drove his SUV partly into the Chausee D’Antin Metro entrance before he realized it wasn’t the parking garage where he’d planned to leave his car.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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