Best thing to avoid competition on a block is to group up with a friend or two from different business' and build up stores there so it covers the whole block, yes.
For vehicle bonus you need a special vehicle, that cannot be bought in the car dealership. That kind of vehicle can only be won or created by merging several vehicles together.
Unfortunately, the feature of merging vehicles are offline for the moment. There is no release date either for now.
...anyways, I've found *Strategy I* on the market, but I cannot BUY it. Can anyone help me out here? The buttons that show up are "How to trade" and "Back" ... I'm totally lost....