[andy popp]

All positive other than being picked up for sex by a middle aged fella in Avignon. He was initially a bit threatening but I was bigger than him though and i guess he decided it wasn't worth the risk so took me to where i wanted to go. Had a stand off as my bag was in the boot and i made him get out and get it before i would get out of the car.

I was propositioned hitching back from the Alps and was offered the princely sum of 5 francs! That did not do much for my self-esteem, I can tell you. Anyway, he was totally fine when I said no and took me where he'd said he would (which was a good long distance that got me north of Paris).

[stone]

All positive other than being picked up for sex by a middle aged fella in Avignon. He was initially a bit threatening but I was bigger than him though and i guess he decided it wasn't worth the risk so took me to where i wanted to go. Had a stand off as my bag was in the boot and i made him get out and get it before i would get out of the car.

I was propositioned hitching back from the Alps and was offered the princely sum of 5 francs! That did not do much for my self-esteem, I can tell you. Anyway, he was totally fine when I said no and took me where he'd said he would (which was a good long distance that got me north of Paris).

I was propositioned on a couple of occasions (by perhaps somewhat odd middled aged guys). They were totally fine when I said no. It didn't seem threatening at all. If I'm honest, I was flattered.

[petejh]

You're projecting your opinions about capitalism onto the discussion.

Welcome to UKB   

[Paul B]

Hitchhiking has landed me in some fairly interesting situations. Did anyone else suffer a lift from the lady that lived near the campsite at Ceuse? We nicknamed her Ms Alain Prost for obvious reasons as she piloted an old Peugeout estate at significant speed into Gap. She clearly trusted us as she stopped somewhere on the way once and left her handbag on the passenger seat and the keys in the ignition.

When hitchkining with a now-wad when we were both 16-18ish I can remember a new-age horsebox stopping and saying we could have a lift but one of us had to sit in the child's seat as it was too much effort to remove. We flipped a coin; I lost and spent the entire journey sat in this thing with my feet on the dashboard in prime position to be ejected through the front windscreen in a crash. The same person, two others and myself also flagged down a Peugeot 205 for a lift to Bas Cuvier camping. We each had a large pack and I'm assuming we had a few pads. The car was extremely full but the driver seemed to just find it amusing that we thought camping in Feb was a good idea (it was not).

On our Euro-trip Nat and I used one of the canoe companies (smugly) to hitch to the start of the trips they do. However, being tight I'd spent the day before purchasing the cheapest inflatable boat I could find and some cheap plastic oars. We set off (eventually after blowing the boat up without a pump etc.) and promptly grounded and popped the bottom leaving us with just an inflatable ring. The gorge walls increased in height and we soon realised we'd committed to 27km or so. It was hot so Nat was wearing a bikini and some shorts and I think I was just in shorts. This changed when it got dark. We eventually found a chateau, climbed the gates it had to the river, abandoned the 'boat' in the grounds, climbed the gate to get out and then hitched back from the road. I can remember the car still now as a Renault 19. The owner didn't say anything to us (dripping wet in the dark wearing nothing but swimwear) other than "en vacance?".

I last picked up hitchhikers (two young German ladies) in Spain on the way to Pamplona. I'd had a bit of a head issue at Riglos and just wasn't able to climb so we were trying to make the most of the trip. I can't remember where we picked them up but it was near the start of the journey and we took them all the way. They spent the journey testing and laughing at my poor attempts at speaking their language.

[Tom de Gay]

Another anecdote about lone women hitching: my aunt hitched alone from Bristol to India, through the middle east in the 1950s. I'm sure that wouldn't be recommended now.

Why not now if then?

I think the risks are just the same then as they are now.  Arguably safer now, as someone said, re trackable mobile phones, gps, communications etc.

By the '60s travelling overland to India under your own steam was a well-travelled route for the somewhat adventurous, usually taking in the chic metropolitan tourist destination of Kabul. Doesn't look like there is a feasible safe route today.

[SamT]

Yes, I guess the risk of being injured/killed in a missile strike is greater than any risks relating to hitching itself. 

[Moo]

I used to regularly hitch down Langdale with a bouldering mat around 2004/7.

Most interesting guy was a bloke visiting from a former Soviet republic who gave a fairly in depth lecture about life before and after the Soviet Union. 

Nowadays I’d bin off climbing and go for a coffee with him because you don’t meet someone like that every day, but I was young even more stupid than I am now and suffering from the blind psyche usually associated with the earlier years of climbing.

[SA Chris]

I was sure i wrote this out on here, but it seems not.

We were hitchhiking at the end of our trip just outside Pisa planning on getting as far as we could. My mate and I were picked up by a French female trucker at about 10pm. We chatted in broken French and English all night, until we got to Marseille where she lived just as it was getting light. Sher asked us if we wanted breakfast, so we went up to her apartment where she got out coffee, bread, ham and cheese, then picked a few leaves from a plant growing on the balcony, dried them under the grill and we sat on the balcony watching the dawn break over the Med. She went to bed, and we collapsed on her spare bed and slept until after lunch, when her brother came and got us up and gave us a lift to the A7 Junction, where we got a ride with a british trucker as far as the outskirts of Paris.

I'd like to pretend more happened but it didn't!   

[SA Chris]

On our Euro-trip Nat and I used one of the canoe companies (smugly) to hitch to the start of the trips they do. However, being tight I'd spent the day before purchasing the cheapest inflatable boat I could find and some cheap plastic oars. We set off (eventually after blowing the boat up without a pump etc.) and promptly grounded and popped the bottom leaving us with just an inflatable ring. The gorge walls increased in height and we soon realised we'd committed to 27km or so. It was hot so Nat was wearing a bikini and some shorts and I think I was just in shorts. This changed when it got dark.

Was this Verdon Gorge?

[Paul B]

No, somewhere near Gorges du Tarn I think. What's possibly amusing to others (and shows just how tight I am/was), we rapidly forgot this lesson and used a small inflatable at Diablo being overly optimistic with the swell. It was rated for one 7-9yr old and had us both in it. Now, we were very light despite the diet including a lot of red wine/sangria but not THAT light.

[mrjonathanr]

Could the answer to the thread question be: because car ownership increased massively from c19M in 1970 to c33M today? And maybe social attitudes have changed to make it a less practicable mode of transport.

[SamT]

In a nutshell.. yes 

[gme]

It was rated for one 7-9yr old

Plenty of space then.

[James Malloch]

Could the answer to the thread question be: because car ownership increased massively from c19M in 1970 to c33M today? And maybe social attitudes have changed to make it a less practicable mode of transport.

Basically the same amount that the population has increased by (55M in 1970 and 68M today). But that puts ownership up from 33% to 48%.

[stone]

Could the answer to the thread question be: because car ownership increased massively from c19M in 1970 to c33M today? And maybe social attitudes have changed to make it a less practicable mode of transport.

Basically the same amount that the population has increased by (55M in 1970 and 68M today). But that puts ownership up from 33% to 48%.

That is all complicated though by the increase in households with several vehicles and whether adults living with their parents (as happens more now) have access to "household" cars etc. But anyway, it certainly doesn't account for much of the >99% drop off in hitching.

[stone]

I just realised that I hadn't even googled my original pondering. So I did and it produced this hilarious BS : https://www.greatgapyears.co.uk/HitchHikingDangers.html

That still leaves the deeper question of why that aversion gets traction now when it didn't then. That link starts off with an admission that their assertions about the terrible dangers aren't based on any evidence.

[SA Chris]

I blame Roger Waters

[petejh]

That still leaves the deeper question of why that aversion gets traction now when it didn't then.

As others have said, a mix of factors.
Social norms changed - it isn't cool to hitch. If the youth were putting up hitchhiking adventures on social media showing hitching to be a normal part of their life then it could be different. But they aren't. Sheep are gonna follow.
Hedonic adaption (another Housel reference from me there Bradders ) - it has become the norm to have a car or a friend with a car. If you don't have access to personal transport then you're not keeping up with the living standards of the average person, which feels shit when you're hard-wired to compare.
Risk aversion - I think we're a bit more risk averse in general today than we were in the 1980s/90s. Risk is perceived to be real, whether it's actually real or imagined is separate. Instant widespread consumption of media doesn't help - news normally has to be negative to be interesting enough to want to read.

[sirlockoff]

personal anecdote, growing up with seeing some docuseries / films such as wolfs creek, the hitchhiker about hitchhiking, I definitely am very cautious about picking up anyone 

[stone]

it has become the norm to have a car or a friend with a car. If you don't have access to personal transport then you're not keeping up with the living standards of the average person, which feels shit when you're hard-wired to compare.

Are people more hard wired now than in the 1980s/90s? I sort of thought of the 1980s as being the zenith of the "greed-is-good" mindset. My impression is that there are plenty of people nowadays with a sort of "freegan" tendency. There are repair-cafes and such like now eg https://www.harlandworks.co.uk/repair-cafe

The idea that people without personal transport, are failing to get about as they might wish, due to not wanting to be publicly noticed as lacking personal transport, is saddening.

Hopefully the apps that jiwi mentioned are providing transport for lots of people. I've sort of got an aversion for wantonly using apps for something that works fine without -but that's my hang-up.

[Will Hunt]

Among the speculation about social trends I don't think people are paying nearly enough attention to the fact that hitching is an incredibly inconvenient way to travel if the journey is not an integral part of the fun of the trip. If you want to go on a climbing holiday and you've got a week or two, hitching is going to eat into a lot of climbing time and there will be times along the way when you're having a really shit time not getting a lift. It took us hours and hours to get out of Calais and the place is a thoroughly depressing hole!  Considering that air travel has become significantly cheaper since the 70s and 80s it's no wonder that people don't hitch to the Verdon any more. If you're on a gap year and want an interesting way to get to Istanbul then fill your boots.

Even for short or medium length trips (the Peak from Sheffield/the Lakes from Leeds) it's not reliable. When we were using hitching as a means to get around we were generally going trad or sport climbing. Try hitching with a bouldering pad!

Retrospectively it probably never would have occurred to me to use hitching as a form of transport had I not been shown the ropes by someone (just before starting university I went to stay with Tom Ripley for a couple of days. We hitched home from the train station where he met me, then hitched from his house near Patterdale to Dow and Eskdale). So if there's nobody to introduce you to it then you may not consider it as an option.

[SamT]

What Will said.

Especially the bit about being shown the ropes.. there's a definate art to it.  Where to stand, demeanor, even refusing lifts if they're going to land you in a bit of a crap location to get a lift on from there which I've done in the past.

[Paul B]

Especially the bit about being shown the ropes.. there's a definate art to it. 

I found hitchhiking by myself or with other male friends difficult (apart from around Ceuse). However, hitching with my wife was entirely different, and we were almost always given a lift within a few cars.

[Johnny Brown]

If you don't have access to personal transport then you're not keeping up with the living standards of the average person, which feels shit when you're hard-wired to compare.

I don't think his is true at all. Firstly, I'm not sure what you mean by hard-wired, but to me it implies a genetically driven imperative. While a sense of fairness seems inbuilt, the sort of keeping up with the joneses peer-competition thing is almost entirely social conditioning, and plenty has been written about how people in the post-WW2 years had to be persuaded into consumerism via advertising. In the typical 'primitive' society there would be no personal embarrassment in not having the same as your peers, only societal shame in letting you down.

Secondly, (and this is much more obvious and practical in London but by no means confined to it) it is increasingly fashionable to not have a car, particularly among the younger demographic for whom conspicuous consumption is far from cool or worthy.

[petejh]

But we don't live in a primitive society? And haven't done for a long time.

I've noticed some of your positions boil down to living in a world that doesn't exist anymore.

Secondly, the people you're talking about who eschew playing the consumption game are absolutely comparing themselves with others, just not the majority