A l'UM la science [S03-ep05]: The effects of competition after the Macron Law

This week in A l'UM la science, Thierry Blayac, an economics researcher at CEE-M, looks at the effects of the liberalization of the long-distance bus sector under the Macron law. Our report takes you to the Mediterranean coastal environment station(Smel) in Sète, and Sylvie Rapior invites you to this weekend's Mushroom and Autumn Plant Show.

With the autumn vacations just around the corner, the luckiest among you may be wondering what mode of transport to choose to get out of town and pick chestnuts and mushrooms in the open fields. If you've got your own car, there's no need to worry, although with the price of fuel, that omelette with oyster mushrooms could prove costly. For the rest of us, public transport is the best solution. In France, long-distance passenger transport has long been the preserve of the railways, with the SNCF holding a monopoly on this market.

It wasn't until 2011 that the first long-distance buses quietly emerged on the scene. Cabotage, as this activity is known, is subject to a number of conditions, which we'll come back to later. In 2015, long-distance buses took center stage in the news with the law of August 6, 2015, which may or may not be remembered as the Macron law from the days when the current tenant of the Élysée Palace still only occupied Bercy. In the months following the enactment of this law, mergers between the sector's "big boys" took place: Flixbus bought Megabus, Ouibus bought Starchipper before itself being bought by Blablacar and so on.

Thierry Blayac is an economist at the Centre d'économie de l'environnement in Montpellier, and has been studying the effects of these so-called horizontal mergers on long-distance bus companies' services, particularly in terms of frequency, but also prices and load factors. His analysis was published in Review of industrial organization in 2023 under the title What can be Expected from Mergers After Deregulation? The Case of the Long-Distance Bus Industry in France..

In the second part of the show, we take you to the Mediterranean coastal environment station in Sète. For the next few weeks, we'll be taking you on a tour of the various platforms of this infrastructure. For this first episode, we start with a historical tour of this magnificent building, a little jewel located just opposite the famous Pointe courte.

Finally, our last-minute guest is Sylvie Rapior, who tells us about the Mushroom and Autumn Plant Show on October 21 and 22 at the Institut de Botanique, with exhibitions and conferences. Free admission, of course! When I told you about oyster mushroom omelettes...

At UM la science you've got the program, here we go!

Coproduction: Divergence FM / Université de Montpellier
Animation: Lucie Lecherbonnier
Interviews: Aline Périault / Lucie Lecherbonnier
Reporting and editing: Lucie Lecherbonnier
Production : Tom Chevalier

Listen to the program "A l'UM la science" on Divergence FM 93.9