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Hitchhiking - Safety

Hitchhiking - Safety: Encyclopedia II - Hitchhiking - Safety

Hitchhiking - Crime. The safety of hitchhiking varies from country to country. In the United States, where hitchhiking had been a fairly common means to travel from one location to another well into the 1970s, especially among younger people, the practice has greatly declined in the past several decades to the point that is extremely rare to see people hitchhiking in the US today, in part because of the supposition that it is unsafe. It can also be noted that because the US has become generally more prosperous, since the mid-1980s, more people can afford to own cars and many rural areas ...

Hitchhiking: Encyclopedia II - Hitchhiking - Safety

Hitchhiking - Safety

Hitchhiking - Crime

The safety of hitchhiking varies from country to country. In the United States, where hitchhiking had been a fairly common means to travel from one location to another well into the 1970s, especially among younger people, the practice has greatly declined in the past several decades to the point that is extremely rare to see people hitchhiking in the US today, in part because of the supposition that it is unsafe. It can also be noted that because the US has become generally more prosperous, since the mid-1980s, more people can afford to own cars and many rural areas now have extensive local bus systems.

There have been very few efforts to objectively study the safety of hitchhiking. Two notable efforts include:

California Crimes and Accidents Assciated with Hitchhiking, Operational Analysis Section, California Highway Patrol (CHP), 1974 Conclusion: the results of this study do not show that hitchhikers are over-represented in crimes or accidents beyond their numbers. When considering statistics for all crimes and accidents in California, it appears that hitchhikers make a minor contribution.

Anhalterwesen und Anhaltergefahren, BKA-Forschungsreihe, Sonderband, Wiesbaden, 1989 Conclusion: The current study has demonstrated, that the potential danger while hitchhiking is significantly lower than it is estimated to be and therefore the sharing of rides by and with strangers can very well be included in transport planning.

Neither work was highly publicized. The authors of the German study, easily the most recent and comprehensive study suggest very real efforts to suppress and discredit their results. Such is the apparent strength of the conviction that hitchhiking must be unsafe, that objective evidence is anything but popularized and lauded.

In summary: there is a dominant belief that hitchhiking is dangerous, but every effort to find actual evidence of this danger objectively has been unable to do so.

Hitchhiking - Road Safety

While much of the public discourse regarding the safety of hitchhiking is concerned with violent crime, road safety is an equally important factor; some hitchhikers argue that one is much more likely to be run over than to be assaulted. Hitchhikers can reduce the risk by being highly visible, by standing next to rather than in the road, and by refusing to let themselves be dropped in unsafe places (e.g. on the roadside of a motorway). Hitchhiking can also put drivers into dangerous situations (e.g. rear-end collisions when a driver suddenly stops). Books and webpages on hitchhiking often advise to "Think for the driver", which means hitchhikers must also consider the drivers' safety when selecting locations for hitchhiking and deciding where to be dropped.