Great Western Coffee Shop

I could have called this thread "mix Ouibus with BlaBlaCar and you get ...", but that's only today's news. SNCF is selling its Ouibus operation to BlaBlaCar, and buying into the business (just a small minority stake). Ouibus is France's second-biggest long-distance coach line, after Flixbus, and its 30% share is big enough to lose SNCF lots of money. Obviously they don't think it will ever stop losing money under their ownership, so they have had a rethink of the issue.

These bus routes were restricted to not compete with trains, until new rules were introduced by a young industry minister called Macron (whatever happened to him?). SNCF felt threatened and felt they had to try to keep the business their trains lost, but it's a low-margin business that has already killed off Megabus France, and now SNCF too.

During the rail strikes SNCF started to collaborate with BlaBlaCar as a way of offering substitutes to get people to work, and that has led to ideas of further cooperation. SNCF are now talking about through bookings for train + bus + car share - and "BlaBlacar are not the enemy any more, our common enemy is the private car". That looks to have more relevance here than the sale, hence the title.