Traffic report for Highways in France or Bison Futé
Bison Futé or the « Clever Bison », is the national traffic website for Highways in France and now also available as a phone app. The Bison gives the current incident reports (accidents, closures, construction) for all highways in France as well as predictions of traffic volume for holiday weekends. It is a very helpful site for avoiding notorious traffic jams on French roads during the high traffic weekens on the routes des vacances. But why on Earth is the traffic reporting system called « Bison Futé » and incarnarted by an American Indian? The « clever » part makes sense as the clever traveler avoids traffic, but why « bison »? Well they almost choose Ginette la Girafe (who could see a long ways thanks to her height, note that in French girafe takes just one « f »). Other suggestions for a mascot were Thimothée the bird who culd see far ahead with her binoculars, a dolphin or a rat, so why not an Indian? Bison Futé is an eye-catching, smart, affable American Indian, whose name is « Bison ». The character was invented by a publicity man named Daniel Robert in 1976 as a gimic to get people’s attention as France rolled out a campaign to encourage people to use alternative routes and depart at different times of the day to avoid sitting in monster traffic jams like the one on 2 August 1975. That massive slow down stretched all across France down most of highway 10 from Paris to Bayonne, that’s 600km! It was the dog days of summer, (la canicule) temperatures rose to 35°C and of course very very few had air conditioning in the mid-seventies many drove the iconic 2CV which you can read about here. To keep cars from overheating engines were turned off and people piled out to push their cars – they were only going a few kilometers an hour anyway. The government was blamed (seemingly a national sport) and so the next year the government rolled out the Bison Futé campaign along with the » itinéraires bis » or signage for alternate itineraries to populaire destinations. And it worked, the next year there were half as many traffic jams and Bison became every French (Belgian and Dutch) driver’s best friend. Nostalgics can participate in the biennial re-enactment of the great Route 10 traffic jam in September http://nationale10.e-monsite.com/ Bell-bottoms (pattes d’eph), cars from before 1977 and Joe Dassin songs on the radio! Only in France would they renact a bouchon.
However as there are more and more cars, even with Bison Futé the all time traffic record keeps going up: 857 km total accumulated jams on all the routes of France on Saturday 5 August 2017 and July 8th 2023 nearly 1000km. The moral of the story? Never leave home without consulting Bison!
In 2022, on the occasion of the modernization of its website, Bison futé changed its logo. The new logo is based on a bison silhouette that draws a route. One of the horns in the letter n materializes a road facing the future. Bison Futé now has an important environmental dimension for the future: less congestion means less fuel consumption and fewer polluting emissions.
Larger French cities have their own traffic sites which you can find via the national Bison Futé. There are more and more cars, Paris can see a total of 300+ kilometers of traffic during any given rush hour! You can get an up to the minute traffic report for the Paris area on http://www.sytadin.fr/. This site also allows you to look at traffic graphs to see what time is best to depart from home on a given day of the week, allowing you to figure how long you need to get to the airport for example.