The history of hitchhiking shows the social value of sharing the road with strangers and friends alike
~ Jonathan Purkis ~
Imagine, if you can, that hitchhiking was once again part of everyday culture. Imagine, if you will, economic incentives to share the road, and the social and mental health benefits of sharing the road with strangers. Imagine guerilla billboards declaring, ‘if you drive alone you ride with the Grim Reaper’.
The history of hitchhiking shows the social value of sharing the road with strangers and friends alike, and has proved to be as inspirational for artistic creativity as it has been effective for solving short-term crises of resources and infrastructure. Access to global media has assisted public awareness not only in terms of what works (one thinks of the highly successful ‘casual carpooling’ or ‘slugging’ in the Bay Area of San Francisco to access High Occupancy Vehicle Lanes), but also the possibility of social connectivity in places of transport poverty (as often witnessed in the popularity of the BBC’s Race Across the World).
Studying the history of lift-giving for my book Driving with strangers: What hitchhiking tells us about humanity has revealed many moments where economic crises, wars or political upheaval led people into mass cooperative efforts, in ways that the British establishment in particular has been keen to mobilise. Yet anarchists have always pointed to people’s ability to switch into self-organising mode in spite of government decrees rather than because of them.
Take this amazing map pictured below, composed by Hungarian hitchhiker Ábel Sulyok, who in 2019 used data sent into Hitchwiki.org (the premier hitchhiking site in the world) to plot a representation of where it was easiest to get lifts within Europe. A cursory glance tells us that it is hard to get lifts around London, Milan, Paris and other urban centres, whereas rural travel is mostly easier. However, individual transport cultures also play a part.
The Netherlands has a long history of shared transport, installing liftplaats since the 1970s, so it scores highly. But consider Spain, where despite its long cooperative traditions, thumbing a lift has always been regarded as tricky.If we dig deeper, other cultural patterns emerge, such as places with a high throughput of adventure tourism or the existence of a tradition of intentional communities. These elicit a better rating. Across the world, small island communities or nations score well, presumably because there is a shared sense of place and trust defined by water. For instance, the Canadian Gulf Islands off Vancouver each have had different forms of hitching relevant to the needs of the communities and catering for visitors (even protesting an attempt to remove a pick up point on Saltspring Island in 2017).
Mapping moments and movement of mutual aid helps us to understand the localities we live in, and whether it is possible to initiate car pooling or pickup points. In his book Seeing like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott talked about ‘practical knowledges’ rooted in the specific connections that people have to their immediate environments; a reminder that templates for social betterment cannot be imposed, they need to emerge. Useful then to consider the social dynamics of what occurs when forms of car sharing or hitchhiking have been ‘top down’ in their planning. Even the most celebrated of organised hitching – the Action Autostop voucher system which ran in Poland between 1957 and 1994 (allowing drivers to be incentivised to share their vehicles), was resisted by the existing hitching culture, who felt it tainted the purity and flexibilities of the social exchange.
Since 1990 in Cuba hitchhiking has been organised by government amarillos (yellow jackets) who flag down vehicles on major highways during office hours. This was a practical response to the drying up of Soviet oil money and coping with the ongoing American blockade of the island. Under such circumstances, the social exchange and negotiated aspects of hitching disappear, but one always get a lift and the wider sharing ethos allows women to feel more comfortable travelling alone.
Why such snapshots of shared mobility matter in the metacrisis, is that forms of self-organisation will become increasingly vital as the existing systems of governance and formal flows of capital break down. We can see forms of ‘pro-social prepping’ emerging in many communities, focusing on local food systems, the growth of citizen’s assemblies and repair cafes. Plenty of these have evolved out of the spirit of the mutual aid projects during COVID-19, of the sort which both Rhiannon Firth and Simon Springer have written on. Unthinking the motor age and its organisation of life around individual car ownership will be harder. The cross generational capacity building which allowed hitchhiking in the 1940s to be part of public transport consciousness up until the neo-liberal era was based on an ethos of travel as a form of community.
The era of mass hitchhiking may well be past, but its continual flourishing through a diversity of small projects, linked to the needs of specific communities or circumstances, continues to inspire new generations of travellers as well as providing local solutions to wider systemic inequalities.
