Simon Calder: the man who pays his way

You've flown easyJet, now ride easyBus

Reports of the demise of hitch-hiking are premature. Kevin Connolly writes about his recent road exploits for the radio trilogy The Last Hitchhiker. But he wasn't the last. I know that for a fact because this week I found myself in a distant corner of Darmstadt, itself a far-flung fragment of Frankfurt, with no visible means of supporting my plan to reach the airport in time for the flight to London. A deadline concentrates a hitcher's mind wonderfully, yet there is precious little you can do as you trudge alongside the B426 besides trying not to look like an axe murderer.

Just as the time (pressing on) and motion (barely perceptible) equation was beginning to unravel, an ageing Opel Corsa wheezed to a halt. Its owner, an architecture student named Karin, happily helped me out of a pickle and into her car. In a hitching career that has trudged through three decades, I reckon this was lift number six thousand and something. Yet if the latest plan from easyJet's founder takes off, hitch-hiking may be given one final ride towards oblivion. Thumbing along the arteries of Britain could be rendered uneconomic. How so? Read on.

* First Luton, next Milton Keynes, now Coventry: the easyGroup specialises in setting up in unfashionable places. The empire began at Luton airport in 1995, when Stelios Haji-Ioannou created easyJet. Once the no-frills airline had flourished, earning the founder hundreds of millions of pounds, Stelios moved on. The launch of easyCinema, which will see seats on sale for as little as 20p, takes place in the cultural mecca of Milton Keynes next month. Now, I can reveal exclusively, a new venture called easyBus is poised to price hitch-hikers out of the market between London and Coventry.

Stelios has picked up on a form of transport that thrives in many parts of the world: the express minibus. To give you an idea of how popular this device is, the minibus comprises the main means of middle-distant transport in three countries beginning with the letter "U" alone – Uganda, Ukraine and Uruguay. In these and other nations, you can be whisked from one city to another in comfort. In most places, the driver waits until the vehicle is full before setting off, but Stelios intends to do things differently.

TRAVEL'S FAVOURITE entrepreneur is setting up a squadron of minibuses that will offer rides between the capital and the Midlands. He is aiming for journeys of an hour or two, and has homed in on Birmingham, Coventry and Leicester as the three cities likely first to be linked with London by easyBus. (Anyone who has suffered rush hour on the M1 or M6 may take issue with the one- to two-hour assumption.) The relatively small size, one-third of the typical coach, means easyBus will be able to operate at higher frequencies than the existing National Express services. Minibuses can also provide links that would be uneconomic for larger vehicles, such as a service aimed at the Asian community and connecting Southall in west London with Leicester. Crucially, easyBus will use flexible pricing to match demand to supply – in other words, filling some seats at absurdly low prices.

National Express is running a poster campaign promoting its day-return fare of £13.50 between London and Birmingham, and comparing it with Virgin Trains' £93.50 ticket. But both look overpriced compared with Stelios's business model, which assumes a break-even fare of £6 each way. At busy times you will pay more. But plan to travel midweek and book in advance and you can travel almost for free: "With our standard yield management philosophy," says Stelios, "if you book two or three weeks in advance for an off-peak departure, it will start at £1."

A return fare of £2 is less than the one-way Tube fare from central London to Brent Cross. This roundabout, at the foot of the M1, is the traditional starting place for hitching to all points north. Stelios's move to start a cheap minibus service at the start of the new academic year is clearly intended to tempt freshers from the roadside to the easyBus, and to deplete further the ranks of Warwick University's Golden Thumb Club. Could hitch-hiking go the same way as supersonic air travel, also scheduled to shut down in October? Stelios has no great love of thumbing: "I did hitch-hike as a 14-year-old island-hoping around the Greek islands on my first holiday without my parents, but not since then," he says.

KARIN'S CAR rumbled through the environs of Frankfurt in the general direction of Germany's biggest airport. This journey may not be the stuff of Kerouac novels. Yet between us, Karin and I solved many of the world's problems along the way, and I reached the airport on time (unlike, it must be said, BA's aircraft). Hitching in the Federal Republic is almost always fun. But if you prefer not to take your chances on the road, the Germans have organised hitch-hiking. Every town of any size has a Mitfahrzentrale bureau, where willing drivers are teamed up with prospective passengers in return for a small fee.

* Stelios must regret that easyBus is not yet running; the service would enjoy a bumper Easter. Many rail links to and from London are disrupted over the long weekend, including the line serving Coventry and Birmingham. Paddington is closed completely. Yet this weekend, as always, German rail travellers are encouraged to see their country with the Schönes-Wochende ("Happy Weekend") ticket. Five adults can travel anywhere in Germany on a Saturday or Sunday for a total of €28 (£20), without thumbing.

NEW STATESMAN magazine is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a reprint of the first edition. In 1913, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb were worrying about upheavals in the Balkans, especially "gallant little Montenegro".

My attention was caught by the advertising, which includes an ad for a book that demands to be read: The Putamayo, Devil's Paradise, which is WE Hardenburg's account of travel in the Peruvian Amazon – "With a Map and many Illustrations". Dr Henry S Lunn takes out a half-page to promote "Tours in Italy for the Spring". For £22 10s (£22.50 in new money, but equivalent to £1,350 today) travellers were taken to Genoa, Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice and Milan. Ninety years on, a full page ad has been taken out by Messrs easyJet, who – along with Ryanair – will fly you to airports quite close to any of those places for little more than £22 10s. It could cost you more to reach the airport, unless you hitch.