Tag Archives: France

On the Road with Smart Bison

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The French love going on holidays in their own country. Annual leave stands at five weeks and school holidays in the summer at two months, so there’s plenty of time to choose from and many lovely places to go to. Mer ou montagne? (Sea or mountains?) you will hear, or Mer ou campagne? (Sea or countryside?) In the end, lots and lots of French holiday-makers will head for the Mediterranean or the Atlantic coast in July or August. As holiday rentals start and end on Saturdays in high season, I’ll let you guess on which day traffic volume is highest.

Queuing for cheap gas at the start of summer holidays

Back when autoroutes were built and expanded and more and more people got cars, a traffic information system slowly developed. It got a big boost after tragedy struck during an August Saturday in 1975 when a combination of heat wave and traffic accidents killed almost 150 people.

Authorities realized they needed to work on three main points:

  • Spreading the traffic over a larger time period
  • Reinforcing alternative itineraries
  • Communicating with the travelers
The Saint Arnoult toll station, with 39 toll gates one of the biggest in Europe, a dreaded congestion point on holiday weekends

It was in this context that Bison Futé (Smart Bison) was created, a character who’d tell people the smart time to travel to avoid traffic congestion, and the alternative routes to take.
You’ll have guessed given the time (1970s) and the name, what this character was. Fortunately, French authorities have gone with the times, and the present logo of Smart Bison is the outline of a bison head made to look like an itinerary. The Smart Bison has become an icon that couldn’t simply be removed.

The Smart Bison website is run by the Transport Ministry, and both website and the Smart Bison Twitter feed will also warn of adverse weather conditions, like heavy thunderstorms.
But its main focus is traffic. Smart Bison will tell you if it’s a green, orange, red, or black day for departures and for returns.

  • Green means normal traffic (including rush hour traffic in urban areas)
  • Orange means heavy traffic with difficult driving conditions locally or generally
  • Red means very heavy traffic with very difficult driving conditions locally or generally
  • Black means traffic is extremely heavy and driving conditions are extremely difficult on the entire road network

For example, on July 12, 2023,  a Wednesday preceding the weekend with the national holiday July 14 falling on the Friday, and school holidays having started the previous weekend, Smart Bison predicted the following traffic conditions for the weekend:

Thursday
Departures
Orange everywhere but red in the greater Paris area
Returns
Green everywhere

Friday (national holiday)
Departures
Orange in the north and northwest, including the greater Paris area
Green for the rest of the country
Returns
Green everywhere

Saturday
Departures
Red for the entire country
Returns
Green for the entire country

Sunday
Departures
Orange for the entire country
Returns
Orange for the entire country
Red for the greater Paris area

The pattern here is easy to spot:
It clearly was a weekend of departures, not returns, with a peak on Saturday (remember those holiday rentals?). The Red for the greater Paris area and Thursday for departures and Sunday for returns indicates many Parisians going away for the long weekend.

Not all that hard to read, is it? So next time you plan to drive in France, consult Smart Bison!

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Electing the Assembly

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The French parliament is composed of the National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale) and the Senate (Sénat). The National Assembly is elected every five years, the same year as the presidential elections.

There are 577 seats in the National Assembly. The deputés (MPs) are elected in single-member constituencies in a two-round vote, just like the French president.

All candidates who receive at least 12,5% of the electorate (which includes all registered voters, whether they cast a vote or not) go into the runoff, unless one candidate gets the absolute majority of valid votes (=votes that were actually cast) and 25% of the electorate (=all registered voters), in which case this candidate wins the seat and there is no runoff.
In the runoff, which is held one week after the first round, the candidate with the most votes is elected.

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It’s a nut—it’s a chestnut!

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Do you like chestnuts?

Chestnuts (châtaignes or marrons) are the fruit of the chestnut tree, le châtaignier, which is native to the Mediterranean region but also grows in more northern parts of Europe, including all of France and Germany.
Notably in the regions of the Cévennes and the Limousin in south-central France, chestnuts used to be an important food source, hence the tree’s nickname of arbre à pain, bread tree.

Dried and ground, the chestnuts make for a kind of flour that needs to be mixed with some wheat flour in order to make bread, pancakes, or pastries, which you find mainly in Corsica.

The département of Ardèche (in south-eastern France) is famous for its chestnut specialty crème de marrons, chestnut cream, which you can purchase at any French supermarket in the jam section.

If you are looking for roasted chestnuts from a street vendor, follow their cries of “Chauds les marrons!”
Another French specialty are marrons glacés, candied chestnuts, a popular Christmas sweet.

The sweet chestnut is not to be confused with the horse chestnuts, utterly inedible. The horse chestnut tree is the one producing white pyramids of flowers that are called candles in German.

During a recent walk in the woods—I write this as of mid-November—I came across a group of chestnut trees that had the ground littered with chestnuts. Some were still in their burrs, but most lay among the leaves. Picking them up proved more fun than expected, for as soon as I had spotted one chestnut, I suddenly saw them everywhere. Within a few short minutes, I had collected 650g of them.

I’d never made roasted chestnuts myself, I usually buy them from a street vendor. But I found a very simple recipe I’d like to share here.

Roasted Chestnuts

Rinse your chestnuts and let them dry. Then make an X-shaped incision into each.

Preheat the oven to 220°C (about 430°F).

Put the chestnuts into the oven on a baking sheet or into a flat oven dish for about 20-25 minutes, until they begin to blacken.

Let them cool down before removing the skin which is not edible (or at least, not very digestible).
Enjoy.

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