Striking evidence: the impact of railway strikes on competition from intercity bus services in Germany

Matthias Beestermöller, Levke Jessen-Thiesen and Alexander Sandkamp

Journal of Economic Geography, 2025, vol. 25, issue 6, 853-872

Abstract: This article investigates the impact of rail service interruptions on customer switching. Using booking data on intercity bus services, we exploit regional variation in rail service cancellations during a strike to show that the disruption in rail transport increases bus ticket sales. The effect persists beyond the strike, indicating that travellers do not return to their originally preferred transport mode. It is particularly pronounced on shorter routes and among leisure passengers travelling on weekends. The findings indicate that customers were previously under-experimenting. Our results imply that incentivising experimentation can foster competition, facilitate transformative change and raise welfare.

Keywords: experimentation; inter-modal substitution; learning; optimization; strike; switching costs; transport (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 L92 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeg/lbaf017 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jecgeo:v:25:y:2025:i:6:p:853-872.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Geography is currently edited by Jorge De la Roca, Stephen Gibbons, Simona Iammarino, Amanda Ross and James Faulconbridge

More articles in Journal of Economic Geography from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().