Today, via the New York Times, we learned that a long-standing anti-competition rule has finally been tossed. Sometime in 2011, you will be able to climb on a bus in Munich and actually end up in another German city....like Stuttgart or Heidelberg.
Yes, for almost eight decades...you just couldn't travel a long-distance within German borders via a bus, unless it was a tour. You could travel from Frankfurt to Paris. You could travel from Stuttgart to Amsterdam. But getting from one German city to another, just wasn't possible.
This was a protection deal for the Bahn folks. The train network made sure they had no competition. In the 1950s as air travel did finally occur, the Bahn folks couldn't say much. But the bus folks never could get the government to change the rule for them. It was a stupid rule by all accounts.
What'll happen now? Well...it's a curious thing. The Bahn could come up and match prices against the bus companies. For a short term strategy, this is likely the best possible direction for the Bahn. But the bus companies will be able to offer some dynamic changes for folks that the Bahn can't match, like picking up a load of thirty passengers in some smaller dead-end town like Kaiserslautern or Trier, and delivering into the heart of the Frankfurt shopping district in just eighty minutes. The Bahn can't deliver that precisely.
What'll happen now? Well...it's a curious thing. The Bahn could come up and match prices against the bus companies. For a short term strategy, this is likely the best possible direction for the Bahn. But the bus companies will be able to offer some dynamic changes for folks that the Bahn can't match, like picking up a load of thirty passengers in some smaller dead-end town like Kaiserslautern or Trier, and delivering into the heart of the Frankfurt shopping district in just eighty minutes. The Bahn can't deliver that precisely.
Added to this are the worker rides. Imagine a morning bus route that hits five smaller towns about sixty miles away from Mainz and it delivers folks to the nearest trolley car connection for the city. Guys could leave the car at home and pay 150 Euro a month for this direct run to their job in the big city.
My prediction is that the Bahn will realize that it doesn't have the upper hand to this deal, and the majority of these bus routes will end up being profitable. For the little guy with enough money to buy two buses and able to start a run from a rural area to a major shopping area....this might be a great investment opportunity.
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