Early this morning, the word went out.....Bahn (railway) strike for Monday. The deal? Every single train (ICE, regional, local) will be sitting idle tomorrow. This is the result of salary talks going on and the union had to resort to some dramatic affect to reach their goal.
The effect? Well....the authorities over the past couple of decades have worked hard to convince people to use public transportation. So working class families, to a great degree if near metropolitan locations, will have just one single car, and the working spouse will use the bus and railway service to get to work. The same is true for teenagers in apprentice-type positions, or attending some university classes.
Just in the Frankfurt 'shadow' (Mainz, Wiesbaden, Darmstadt) alone, I would take a guess that more than 150,000 are affected. Their plan 'b' situation? Some might carpool over but I expect the bulk to just stay home because they can't make their route work without the network.
This is one of the great negatives about the Bahn deal and how so many people are now attached to it (depending on it to work).
Those with vacations planned to fly out of Frankfurt's airport, but they needed to go by rail tomorrow morning by sixty miles to connect? This is one of the major success stories in that the Frankfurt airport has tens of thousands of people who use the underground station to connect into or out of....to make their trip happen each single day. Those will have to hustle up some shuttle service or talk a relative/friend into dropping them off.
If this strike doesn't draw the anticipated affect to talk over increased salary? My guess is that you will see at least one more strike in December (probably avoiding Christmas week).
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