Poitou-Charentes Road Network and Travel

The French region of Poitou Charentes is a major route used for travelling from Paris or Nantes to Bordeaux. It therefore has many well kept roads and motorways.

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Below are the numbers of roads (different types) in Poitou-Charentes region in 2007:

Motorways	National roads	Secondary roads	Local roads
300	595	19,642	33,768

Sources: INSEE (from SETRA institute)

The A10 motorway goes through the Poitou Charentes region and enables access to many towns including Chatellerault, Poitiers, Niort and Saintes, and connecting the region to Bordeaux and Paris. This national road is pretty recent. The A10 motorway has been opened to the traffic since 1981.

Most of the motorway network is run by the Autoroutes du Sud de la France (ASF). They have cut their network into 3 main parts of about 100 kilometres each:

• Niort, with one part of the A83 (4.2 million transactions)
• Saintes, with one part of the A837 (5.4 million transactions)
• Ambares (6.5 million transactions)