Hippies did not invent hitchhiking. Before the Second World War, it was a common practice for people in all walks of life. Magazines like Sports Illustrated declared it fun to thumb a ride and, during the war, picking up soldiers was nothing less than a patriotic duty. Even the etiquette doyenne Emily Post gave hitching a green light in the 1940s, offering tips on how to keep the conversation light and impersonal.
But it was the ’60s and ’70s counterculture that embraced hitching as an anti-consumerist, pro-environment celebration of human interdependence. Students were hitchhiking to antiwar demonstrations. Civil rights advocates thumbed rides to register voters in the South. The American automotive industry, by then, had gone into overdrive: there were more cars than ever on the road. Yet an entire generation of young people, it seemed, was on the move without buying them.
This, apparently, irked local police officials, as well as the F.B.I. First, in the late 1950s, the F.B.I. began warning American motorists that hitchhikers might be criminals. A typical F.B.I. poster showed a well-dressed yet menacing hitchhiker under the title“Death in Disguise?”.
In the ’60s, the focus began to shift, emphasizing dangers to the hitchhiker instead of the driver. Although many states had some kind of regulation of hitching on the books, communities like Los Angeles, Boston and Nantucket, Mass. began debating municipal bans on soliciting rides. Officials in Cambridge, Mass., took an unusual approach, voting in 1971 to levy fines on motorists who picked up hitchhikers. In towns across the nation, the police arrested underage thumbers and distributed pamphlets. Police officers at Rutgers University handed out cards to hitchhiking women that read, “If I were a rapist, you’d be in trouble.”
Women, in particular, were said to be “asking for it” if they put out a thumb. The news media took the bait, writing scores of articles denouncing the practice. “In the case of a girl who hitchhikes,” a 1973 article in Reader’s Digest declared, “the odds against her reaching her destination unmolested are today literally no better than if she played Russian roulette.”
That was an absurd exaggeration. There were some well-known cases of murderers preying on hitchhikers, but there was no evidence that hitchhiking actually increased the murder rate. The one agency to commission a study on the subject, the California Highway Patrol, found in 1974 that hitchhiking was a factor in 0.63 percent of crimes in the state. That’s hardly Russian roulette. The patrol agency concluded that reducing hitchhiking would probably not reduce crime. But by then the public perception had been transformed. Hitchhiking was considered so reckless that few drivers would encourage it by stopping.
Today, America is safer than it has been for decades, and that goes for our roads too. Hitchhiking is likely to be safer as well, not just because of the well-publicized low crime rate, but because of our constant connectivity. Hitchhikers can text the license plate numbers of a car they enter to a friend. Drivers and riders can upload photos of one another to social media sites. Ride-share bulletin boards and Web sites can make the process even more transparent and safe.