Tag Archives: summer holidays

On the Road with Smart Bison

Posted on by
Reply

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!

Share this:

School’s out

Posted on by
Reply

Summer is here, and that means school’s out in France. Summer holidays (les vacances d’été) start around the beginning of July (or earlier, when younger students are sent home while older students take exams in the school building), and last until the end of August. La rentrée (back to school) is at the beginning of September.

But French students have several shorter breaks (les petites vacances) over the year:

  • All Saints holidays (les vacances de la Toussaint) around All Saints Day (November 1st)
  • Christmas holidays (les vacances de Noël) at, well, Christmas
  • Winter holidays (les vacances d’hiver) in February
  • Spring holidays (les vacances de printemps) around or at least sometime near Easter

Each of these is two weeks long, and though the first two are usually at the same time for everyone, the winter and spring breaks are staggered by region (“zone”) as shown in the map below:

For example, in the upcoming school year 2023-24, the first region to start winter break is Region C, which includes the Paris area. After one week, it is joined by region A. And when Parisians and other Region C residents go back to school, those in Region B start their holidays.
Spring holidays have the same order so that all students have the same amount of weeks between the breaks.
Let’s go one year back: in the school year 2022-23, the first region to start into winter break was Region A, followed by Region B with Region C going last.
There is a regular rotation to ensure all three regions are treated equally, because it can be a long stretch between Christmas break and winter break if you’re in the last group, and a long stretch between spring break and summer holidays if you’re in the first group.

This information might be helpful if you’re visiting France and trying to figure out opening hours of places that say “pendant les vacances de la zone A”.

Enjoy your holidays!

Share this:

Bonne rentrée !

Posted on by
Reply

At the beginning of July, as the school year ends, activity in France begins to slow down. Parents ferry their kids off to camp or to the grandparents, and once the national holiday on July 14 is over, Bison Futé, the Smart Bison of French traffic predictions, warns of the annual traffic jams on the highways as the juillettistes head off to their vacation destinations.
Repeat this every weekend over the summer, with a particularly sharp peak in both directions as the juillettistes, the July holiday-makers, return home and the aoûtiens, the August holiday-makers, take their place.

The slowest time of the summer comes around the public holiday of August 15, when many small shops in the cities close and coastal towns will triple and quadruple their population as families enjoy the summer. I wrote about Paris in August in an earlier blog post.

But even the longest school holidays eventually come to an end. After almost two months, kids have to be back in school at the beginning of September. No big deal, right? It’s similar in many countries in the northern hemisphere. But France has this particularity that school years dictate the rhythm of the nation.

school supplies for the rentrée scolaire

Sports clubs, for example, won’t offer you calendar-year membership but school-year ones. This makes sense for kids who change schedules and activities from one school year to the next, their continuity interrupted by the long summer holidays. But grown-ups, who only have a three-week break in summer, are bound by the same rhythm.

Just as France slows down for the summer, it wakes up again at the rentrée. The term derives from the verb rentrer, to return. In September, you have the obvious rentrée scolaire, the return to school, but also the rentrée politique, as politicians come back from summer recess, the rentrée littéraire, as publishers throw new titles onto the market, variations like rentrée sportive, rentrée radio/tv (as radio and tv stations return to their regular programming), and others happily used by advertisers in late August and early September.

the rentrée littéraire

Everyone gets back to business, and you can wish your French friends a Bonne rentrée!

Share this: