The End of the Open Road: How Hitchhiking Died

I don't have much to say on hitchhiking itself, but it strikes me as another manifestation of the climate of fear we have in the US these days - violent crime of all sorts is way down, but we act far more afraid than we did even when it was much higher. To the point that our paranoia hurts us more than the crime did.

Even worse is how it can be self-perpetuating in situations like this - because hitching is so stigmatized, much fewer normal people are doing it on both sides, making the chances of getting somebody crazy higher.

I hitchhiked up and down the west coast and Mexico in the 1990s, after hitch-hiking had already been vilified in the media. For a large, white male like myself, it was relatively safe, because most of the danger in hitch-hiking encounters actually flows from the hiker to the driver. So if you are the hiker, and you know you're safe, then a lot of the risk has been removed. (For female hitch-hikers, it's another story.)

There were several periods when hitchhiking was widely accepted, and they usually coincided with large groups of otherwise respectable people having to hit the road. The Depression was one of those times. Post-war periods, when soldiers are returning home, have been others.

These days car ownership is so common that you have to be young and crazy, desperately poor, or criminal to hitch hike, and drivers know that.

It's still surprising how many drivers will pick you up. There's a lot of lonely people looking for conversation on the road.

Hitchhiking died because the car culture died.

From the 1950s and into the 1960s, cars were the thing. They were an adventure. You were some moronic kid with nothing exciting to do and, all of a sudden, you had freedom - you could kiss the parents good-bye and hightail it out to have some fun. V8 engines, lots of power waiting to be unleashed, booze in the back seat, a girlfriend or boyfriend to play with, no seatbelts, lots of cigaretts, drive-ins to go to, streets to cruise, etc., etc.

That world is gone now. Of course, any of its elements can be re-created. All the pieces are still there. But the spirit of the thing is gone. Cool people don't waste their time on Saturday nights driving around to impress people with how hot their muscle car is (though they probably do equally silly things as a substitute).

Hitchhiking in its fad sense - i.e., when "everybody" was doing it - was part and parcel of that culture. As noted in this piece, it was probably even more likely that something bad might happen to you back then than it is now for driving around with strangers. So why did vastly greater numbers of people hitchhike back than they do now. For the simple reason that it was regarded as "cool" to do so. Just like it was "cool" to smoke. And just as times have changed for the latter, so they have for the former.

Of course there is some unavoidable risk when you hitchhike or when you pick up hitchhikers. Out of millions of people in America, there are some who inevitably will be predators and who will take advantage of others. The overwhelming majority obviously don't. The risk lies in not knowing whether you will bump into the bizarre exception to the normal rule of human kindness in such situations.

But that risk, together with the alarmist publicity and paternalistic laws that can accompany it, have little to do with why far fewer people are hitchhiking now than they did back in the day. People are strongly affected by their peers and by what they are doing. Then they tend to do the same. In that older era, there was a huge social push to get out on the road in all sorts of ways and hitchhiking took wing as a direct result of that push. Now that is gone. There is no strong peer influence pushing people in that direction. There is nothing cool or adventuresome in the car culture, at least not for many.

And so hitchhiking, at least in America, is left for those who do it out of necessity and for the remaining few who truly enjoy interacting with strangers. For most people, it is a brush-off item that they would never consider. After all, "nobody is doing it."

My high school algebra teacher was a really great guy, a former boxer who felt it was his Christian duty (I think he was a Jehovah's Witness) to pick up hitchhikers. His family always tried to talk him out of it, but he persisted under the theory that God would protect him. One day, we showed up in class to find a substitute teacher telling us that he had been killed by one of the hitchhikers he picked up. True story. That's a data set of size one, but still, I'd never pick up a hitchhiker.

Edit: Heh, Google... here's a doc for the murder trial: http://www.leagle.com/decision/19951341658So2d683_11297.xml/...

Last time I hitchhiked, the driver was the Spain public enemy no.1. Escaped from jail a few days before, using that soap pistol trick, is still on the run, more than 30 years after.

https://www.google.es/search?q=rafael+bueno+latorre

Uh, never more.

I hitchhiked down the east coast of Australia. I had about 6 rides. In at least 4 of them the driver was drinking. I had beers in each so they wouldn't have them. In one car the guy in the passenger seat wasn't driving because he was banned (for drink driving) yet both he and the driver were drinking cans of rum and coke. They'd drink a can, scrunch it and then lop it out the open window before cracking open another. In another truck the guy was having beers whilst driving pulling another car.

In one car the guy said he was stopping for a pee. We pulled off the road, down another road, down another, into a wood. He then stopped the car. I was worried. He got out, too a pee and then off we went again.

Everyone was very nice and we all had fun.

I still see a few hitchhikers a week in my town, mostly heading away from the interstate, deeper into the mountains. When I was living in Leadville, CO, it was still common - you would frequently find folks just standing at the edge of town, looking for a ride down into the other mountain towns, and likewise, just off the I-80 ar Copper Mountain, looking for a ride back to Leadville. For better or worse, they always seemed to want me to drop them off at the liquor store, and that was usually the root cause for hitching - lost their licenses.

I guess my point is that in small mountains towns in the west, we have not yet received the memo that we should not be doing this.

I hitchhiked from California to Washington, D.C. and back last year and I highly reccomend it. The longest I ever waited for a ride was 90 minutes. My female partner and I parted ways halfway through the trip and we both successfully hitched alone with no hint of danger.

Not representative of everywhere, but I hitched (solicited and obtained rides from complete strangers using my thumb) over 27 times last year while thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to central Oregon. Sometimes alone, sometimes in a small group. You encounter a highway after 2-6 days of walking, hitch into town to rest and resupply, then hitch back out to the trail.

I never waited more than an hour, and we usually got picked up in just a few minutes.

Most of them felt like a mutually beneficial exchange. We got a ride, and typically advice of where to stay/eat in town; the driver got to be a little part of a big adventure. Some drivers insisted on detouring to drop us off at the grocery/motel/WWII Japanese internment camp. I can't recall any situations that felt dangerous, though pick-up truck drivers were happy to let us ride in the bed, which is a significant fine for the driver if caught by law enforcement in California.

It's just a ridiculous culture of fear and distrust of others.

I hitched a few thousand miles recently across Europe.

As far as I can tell it's just a misunderstanding of statistics and extreme risk aversion that reduces numbers.

This idea that it's more or less dangerous than some other activity just doesn't jibe with me. Life isn't about going to the gym with muesli and green beans and avoiding scary information and so on. It is precious precisely because we have freedom.

On the idea of public transport replacing hitching - that's a completely different experience. It's commercial. You deal with ticket inspectors assuming you are a thief, barriers, overcrowding, limited routes, high cost (the entire point of hitching is having an extended/permanent trip on a budget). Etc.

Self driving cars may well kill it off entirely. And we will have lost something great - one of the few areas of life untouched by capitalism.

Hitching is way more common in Chile. People actually wait at toll booths to hop on buses or cars - sometimes with big baskets of donuts to sell. Despite what the article says, the only time I've hitched in the US was in a national park after rain unexpectedly started slamming down.

I hitchhiked over 30,000km in the last few years in many countries of Europe and Asia. I would claim that people have usually gross misconceptions of the risks. It is of course very dependent of who and where you are and which techniques you use, but I would say that the risks involved are on par or rather much less than traffic accidents. Western Europe countries tend to be slightly harder because the people are more afraid, and as I'm kind of sick of these societies rooted in fear I don't think I would want to go to the US. Besides, at least in Europe and Asia, hitchhiking works everywhere if you know how to do it, and it's a more fulfilling way of travelling than anything else I've done.

I thought we called it ridesharing these days

My dad used to hitchhike across country. It was very common for people in the military, and the uniform served them well.

I used to hitchhike in college, but it was mostly asking for rides across town in the back of a pickup truck.

I've hitchhiked around 1000 miles in Europe without any problems. I love the experience of meeting, chatting and sharing stories with complete strangers. Most of hitchhiking riders used to hitchhike themselves, so they have a lot of stories to tell, and it's easy way to find out about local culture.

When I've been on a trip to western Ukraine 3 years ago, I picked up a female teacher, which was commuting to her school by hitchhiking every day. Strange that it's easier to hitchhike in poorer rather than richer country.

I hitched across Maui once. I got a guy in a nice car & suit who was almost certainly high on coke (he was coke-chatty), a really nice local guy hauling glass to a construction site, a guy in an old van who had a lot to say about Jesus, and a dude drinking beers in his jeep (I accidentally broke the door latch on it, oops). Never spent more than about 10 minutes waiting for a ride, but 3/4 drivers sketched me out.

Still a fun experience.

I don't think it's a coincidence that hitchhiking became vilified at the peak of the mid century crimewave. It well and truly _was_ more dangerous then. Now, even though the crimewave has subsided, people have scare stories from infotainment journalism and they overestimate the risk, thanks to the availability heuristic.

One thing that might have impacted hitchhiking in Europe is cheap flights. If you can get somewhere in a few hours for less than 100 euro, or hitchhike there in a few days, you must really like hitchhiking or be really poor.

Before the cheap flights, I went hitchhiking not just for fun, but because it was so much cheaper too.

i used to read a forum that was about hitchhiking and train riding experiences. Ive hitchhiked a few times, never across great distances though... would still love to hitch a train cross country though.

Isn't this just because hitchhiking have been replaced by much more car sharing and networks of people pooling and ridesharing?

Hell I wonder if it actually went up but we just changed the definition.

This makes me really sad. I used to really enjoy hitchhiking, I met so many interesting people that way.

When I got a car, I used to pick up every hitchhiker I came upon.

You don't need hitchhiking if there's decent and affordable public transportation. The car culture in US is bizarre for most other half-developed countries out there.