Bretagne Transportation Tips by bzh

'Mode': AROUND
Category: Car/Motor Home
Getting TO/AROUND: Brittany has an excellent road network built around a few dual carriageway roads, where the speed limit is 110 km/h. This is what the French call "voie express". It is faster than a main road but is not quite a motorway. The good news is that Brittany is the only region in France where there is not a single toll paying motorway, while having roads that are in fact motorways in every respect but the name.

Local folklore has it that the reason for not having a single paying road in Brittany is that, when Anne de Bretagne married the French king and hence brought Brittany to the crown of France, one of the articles in the marriage contract stipulated that a tax would never be levied on the Breton people for road usage. Whether this is true or not, the way toll paying motorways coming form Paris give way to non-paying dual-carriageways a few hundred metres before the "welcome to Brittany" sign makes one wonder.

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'Mode': TO,AROUND
Category: Train
Getting TO/AROUND: Brittany is served by two main train lines. The North coast one comes from Paris and serves Rennes, st Brieuc, Morlaix before finishing in Brest. The South coast one, still from Paris, serves Nantes, Vannes, Lorient and finishes in Quimper. Both run high-speed trains (TGV) which means that the 600 km from Paris to Brest are done in 4 hours. All trains to Brittany leave from the Montparnasse station in Paris.

There are also a number of regional trains that can take you to more remote places. In particular, there is a train line between Brest and Quimper that links the two main lines. However, the train frequency on that line is not very high because there are coach lines that do the same route and are actually faster.

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