Bison Futé, the canny buffalo

 Today is the beginning of the August holidays in France. Perhaps that does not call up a mental picture, so I have provided one.

In my first couple of years in France, I did not understand that it was not a good idea to travel on August 1st or 15th. As a result my family and I insouciantly left for Paris from Normandy at about six o'clock one evening. It's a two-hour drive. In the small hours of the morning, exhausted, we found ourselves on a route nationale (a smaller highway which we had taken to escape a horrendous traffic jam on the autoroute), 70 miles from Paris, absolutely stationary. People were having picnics on the roofs of their cars. 

To avoid this scenario, I quickly learned to take advantage of the Bison Futé ("canny buffalo" or "clever bison"), a French-government-run program to help people avoid traffic jams. Today, for example, its webpage looks like this:

 It also has an English version-- annoyingly signaled by the British flag, even though very few of the world's English speakers are British and we actually fought a couple of wars not to be-- which offers a "Live Informations Map" (no need to find a native speaker, apparently).

The former logo of Bison Futé, a green buffalo, has recently been replaced with this one:

 

Comments

[Accius]

I'm sure Native Americans would be thrilled by this imagery!

[Gwan]

I'm not from England either, but really, is it so objectionable to indicate English with the flag of the country that gave birth to the language? Despite your numerical superiority, that makes more sense than a US flag to my mind.