Projo Cars Blog

Idle trucks trucks at the La Jonquera border crossing between France and Spainin Girona, Spain, during a protest against rising fuel costs.

MADRID — Gasoline at $4 a gallon? If that was America’s nightmare at the weekend as fuel prices reached a record national average, pity poor Europe, where the price of oil and taxes levied at the pump combine to push prices to about double the United States’ level.

In the latest show of distress, Spanish truckers Monday began a blockade of their country’s border with France, lining up their rigs and slowing them to a crawl to protest the cost of diesel fuel, according to The New York Times.

The strike blocked the highway in both directions in southwestern France. The protest turned ugly when would-be strike-breakers in Spain found their windshields and headlights smashed and their tires slashed.

But the Spanish drivers were not the only ones feeling the pinch. French drivers slowed traffic near Bordeaux to demand lower fuel prices, offering a foretaste of a planned national strike by truckers next Monday. Portuguese drivers blocked roads and in Belgium thousands of labor union members demonstrated in Liege to protest the rising cost of living as a result of fuel costs.

---