Technology | 2009.06.14
A guide to hitchhiking's decline | Joe Moran
It\'s not driver selfishness that\'s done for thumbing a lift but technological and economic change
Like Poundland and Robert Peston, hitchhiking should be thriving in hard times. It costs nothing, its carbon footprint is tiny and there are now websites, like Digihitch and Hitchwiki , that allow hitchers to exchange vernacular knowledge about the best places to thumb a lift. But I have just been on safari around Britain\'s motorways for a book I have written about roads, and I am sorry to confirm the impression gained by the Guardian\'s Stephen Moss when he spent an entire day hitching to Hay-on-Wye. The hitchhiker is almost as endangered a species as the snow leopard.
The decline of hitching is a lesson in how significant historical changes happen invisibly. I own a secondhand copy of the Hitch-hiker\'s Manual: Britain, published in 1979 by a young travel journalist, Simon Calder. This uninviting-looking book, with its grainy pages and ugly typeface, conjures up an exotic roadside world that is now vanished. It provides a record of the rich hitchhiking subculture that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s: the long line of hitchers at hotspots like Staples Corner at the foot of the M1, with their own imperfectly executed queueing etiquette; the attention-grabbing gimmicks used by the more enterprising hitchers, such as wearing ties, dinner suits and even gorilla costumes; and the dirty tricks employed by the unscrupulous, like leaning on crutches or wearing soldiers\' uniforms to encourage drivers to stop.
Hitchhiking inspired its own sociology. Calder included a table of different permutations of hitchhikers and the typical time it would take them to get a lift, from single women (10-15 minutes) to three men (90 minutes). Men did better if they travelled with women and hid behind a hedge, a common ruse that sounds like something that only happens in films. Many hitchers were students created out of the huge expansion of higher education in this era – but a surprisingly large proportion were birdwatchers, trying to get to remote parts of the country like Cornwall or Shetland, for the golden age of hitching coincided with the golden age of twitching.
Why is this tribe of people virtually extinct? Drivers did not suddenly become less altruistic and, while risk is often cited as a factor, the number of machete-wielding psychopaths on the roads has presumably remained stable.
There are two schools of thought about the decline of hitching. The first focuses on concrete causes – such as the extension of car ownership even to students, the introduction of the young person\'s railcard, cheaper coach services and, most recently, backpackers going further afield on gap years. Hitching on motorways also became more difficult as barriers and "no pedestrian" signs were erected at junctions. This created hitching voids where no one wanted to be dropped off, especially the vast interchanges like Almondsbury and Lofthouse where major motorways crossed – the black holes in the hitchhiker\'s galaxy.
The second school of thought focuses on a more nebulous cultural shift. Hitching began its long decline at the end of the 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher came to power. Is it possible that, in a less equal society that is more sceptical about the value of public goods, there has been a gradual waning of the civic-minded impulse? Certainly the Thatcher years saw a general reaction against anyone perceived as a hippyish freeloader, epitomised by the attitudes towards new age travellers at Stonehenge. In a society where everything has a price, it becomes harder to sustain what the social policy expert Richard Titmuss called the gift relationship: the kinds of exchanges based on trust and goodwill that bring intangible benefits to everyone but are the hardest to retrieve when they are gone. Just as you need a well-populated tribe of hitchers to create the perception that it is a respectable activity, so any gift economy needs a self-sustaining momentum for it to work.
But perhaps the truth is more complicated. It is not that we became more selfish, but that the technological and economic changes of Thatcherism made it possible to withdraw from the world. The drivers of 1970s cars would probably have welcomed the company of hitchers to distract them from the boredom and discomfort of their dodgy suspensions and badly equipped cabins. Now cars have ergonomic driving seats, remote-controlled iPods and automatic temperature controls. Why would we invite a sweaty stranger into this snug haven? The effect has been duplicated in a range of phenomena from ATMs to Oyster cards to internet shopping: it is now easier than ever to avoid contact with other people. Our smartcard society means you can go through life without saying a word to anyone other than friends, family and colleagues. In the soothing micro-environment of a modern car, there really is no such thing as society.
Joe Moran is the author of On Roads: A Hidden History joemoransblog.blogspot.com
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]05/hitchhiking-decline-britain
