Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz. From Paris I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.
Government Math Solves Fuel Crisis by Insisting 20 Cents Fully Replaces 50 Cents
By Jessica Carter-Wilson | Fansweek.org | Lyon, March 29, 2026
Today’s news: Truck drivers organized a filtering blockade on the A7 highway south of Lyon to protest rising fuel costs. Despite a government-announced 20-cent-per-liter aid package, transport companies claim they are still losing 50 cents per liter and face bankruptcy within months.
The French government has finally achieved the impossible: they have turned the A7 highway into the world’s most expensive outdoor reading room. By offering a 20-cent fuel rebate to cover a 50-cent price hike, the Ministry of Finance has effectively told the nation’s truck drivers that if they simply close one eye and ignore the basic laws of subtraction, the logistics industry is actually thriving. On Saturday, drivers responded by parking their rigs and handing out flyers, proving that while they can no longer afford to move goods, they can still afford to move paper at five miles per hour.
The A7 Highway: Now a Very Long, Very Expensive Linear Park
The “filtering blockade” near Lyon is a masterpiece of Gallic restraint. Instead of a total shutdown, the truckers are forcing motorists to merge into a single lane, ensuring that everyone has ample time to contemplate the existential void of a gas tank that costs more to fill than the vehicle it powers. Thierry Momplot, a man who owns exactly one truck and a rapidly vanishing retirement fund, noted that he is currently absorbing a 90-euro daily loss. He plans to stop entirely in six months, which is a polite way of saying the A7 will soon become a 300-kilometer-long monument to stationary heavy machinery. At the current rate of inflation, a parked truck will soon be the most stable asset in the French economy.
If the government’s logic holds, the 30-cent gap between reality and policy doesn’t actually exist; it is merely a “financial vibration” that the truckers should learn to meditate through. This is the new French Miracle: solving a supply chain crisis by ensuring that nothing is ever supplied again. By the time the treasury realizes that trucks require fuel rather than “ministerial encouragement” to move, the only thing being transported on the A7 will be the frustrated sighs of commuters who are now part of a mandatory roadside book club.
“We believe the 20-cent rebate is a generous gesture of solidarity,” says Marc-André Planchard, an anonymous Treasury consultant who presumably commutes by pogo stick. “If a man is bleeding from five wounds and you give him two Band-Aids, he is technically 40 percent healed. To ask for more is simply greed. These drivers need to understand that a truck that doesn’t move is a truck that doesn’t produce carbon emissions. We aren’t killing the industry; we are accidentally achieving our 2050 climate goals twenty-four years early.”
The Boutique School Bus and Other Luxury Dreams
The crisis has moved beyond the world of yogurt and gravel. Even the school buses are under threat. The Rochette company brought a “rutilant” black coach to the protest, a vehicle so shiny it looks like it should be transporting a boy band rather than forty screaming third-graders. But thanks to fuel prices, taking the bus has become a luxury experience on par with a private jet. In the near future, French children will likely have to be dropped off at school via trebuchet, or perhaps they can just stay home and watch videos of what a functioning economy used to look like.
The ultimate irony remains the “cash flow” issue. Large firms like Centre Express Limousin are paying for diesel with cold hard cash today, only to be reimbursed by clients in 45 days, by which time the Euro will likely be traded for bottle caps and bits of shiny string. The trucking industry is essentially acting as a high-interest payday lender for the entire French nation, except the interest is negative and the lender is currently on fire. If Jean-Christophe Gautron is right and 5,000 companies “devissel” (unscrew), we won’t have a fuel problem anymore. We will have a very quiet country where the only thing moving is the government’s goalposts, which, fortunately, seem to be exempt from the price of diesel.
In six months, the silence on the A7 will be deafening. But at least the flyers will have been delivered, even if the person who received them had to walk ten miles to find a trash can.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.