Blog
Law, costs, public tenders and dispatching, practical guidance for everyone who plans, runs or pays for passenger transport.
20 articles
According to the German Federal Employment Agency, bus and tram drivers are a shortage occupation, while car drivers in passenger transport are not. This article puts the official figures in context for transport services, shows their limits and covers the levers an operator controls.
Between the Muster 4 prescription and the payment sit an IK number, a contract, a data record, the original voucher and the co-payment. Where things go wrong is usually written in the state contract, not in the statute.
Most school transport bids do not fail on price. They fail on a missing declaration or a thin concept. What bidders need to know about suitability, scoring, lots and requests for missing documents.
Private hire yes, exempt school transport no, minibus driver with class D1 no: this article uses section 48 FeV to sort out which drivers in a German transport service really need the P-Schein, and how to keep expiry dates under control across a whole team.
Germany’s statutory minimum wage rises in two steps by a combined 13.88 per cent. This article works through a minibus school run to show the cost per hour, per run and per contract, and explains the grounds on which running contracts can be renegotiated.
Vendor comparisons line up feature lists. None of them names what actually derails a rollout. This article derives the selection criteria from the obligations your operation already carries.
“Exempt” reads like “rule-free” to a lot of operators. This article sets out what section 1 no. 4 of the German Freistellungs-Verordnung really exempts, and which obligations in special-needs school transport carry on unchanged.
Schools do not organise school transport, yet they field the complaints first. This article separates the duties of the school, the Schulträger and the transport operator, and uses the state law of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Bavaria to show why there is no single federal rule.
Whether a patient transport trip needs prior approval is decided at the dispatch desk in seconds. It gets paid weeks later. This article sorts out the general rule, the exceptions and the evidence you owe.
What belongs in the specification for a school or disability transport contract so that bids stay comparable and the service still holds up in the third contract year?
The 20-cent tax allowance reimburses a business trip. It is not a price for a transport service. This article walks through the cost blocks that make up the cost per kilometre in a minibus transport service, and why empty running quietly pushes the figure up.
A driver falls ill, a vehicle breaks down, a child does not arrive. In school transport, the disruption reaches the school office first. Where the school responsibility ends and which notification chain holds up.
A rejected record costs you twice, once in cash flow and once in rework. The causes repeat themselves with remarkable reliability, and almost all of them can be settled on the day of travel.
Almost every guide to driving and rest times is written for freight hauliers. In passenger transport everything hangs on a single threshold, and it has nothing to do with tonnes.
German districts owe either the transport itself or reimbursement of the fares. What exactly is owed usually appears only in the district bylaw. An overview of the legal basis, reasonable travel limits and record-keeping duties.
The EU procurement thresholds fell on 1 January 2026, services included. For transport contracts that shifts the line between a national procedure and an EU-wide tender.
In passenger transport, live positioning is an operating requirement rather than a surveillance tool. Employee data protection and co-determination still apply. This article separates what is mandatory, what is discretionary and what most operators store for far too long.
Wheelchair requirements, an emergency note, a call to say someone is ill. A transport operator processes health data whether it intends to or not. This article shows which fields fall under Article 9 GDPR and how to govern access, disclosure and deletion.
A required escort and a requested escort get confused every day. The difference decides whether a seat in the vehicle gets paid for and how the route has to be planned.
Almost every German tender document for disability transport contains one sentence about DIN 75078. It is never explained. This article turns the standard into an operator checklist and into capacity rules for route planning.
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