Hitchhiking died because the car culture died. From the 1950s and into the 1960s, cars were the thing. They were an adventure. You were some moronic kid with n

Hitchhiking died because the car culture died. From the 1950s and into the 1960s, cars were the thing. They were an adventure. You were some moronic kid with nothing exciting to do and, all of a sudden, you had freedom - you could kiss the parents good-bye and hightail it out to have some fun. V8 engines, lots of power waiting to be unleashed, booze in the back seat, a girlfriend or boyfriend to play with, no seatbelts, lots of cigaretts, drive-ins to go to, streets to cruise, etc., etc. That world is gone now. Of course, any of its elements can be re-created. All the pieces are still there. But the spirit of the thing is gone. Cool people don't waste their time on Saturday nights driving around to impress people with how hot their muscle car is (though they probably do equally silly things as a substitute). Hitchhiking in its fad sense - i.e., when "everybody" was doing it - was part and parcel of that culture. As noted in this piece, it was probably even more likely that something bad might happen to you back then than it is now for driving around with strangers. So why did vastly greater numbers of people hitchhike back than they do now. For the simple reason that it was regarded as "cool" to do so. Just like it was "cool" to smoke. And just as times have changed for the latter, so they have for the former. Of course there is some unavoidable risk when you hitchhike or when you pick up hitchhikers. Out of millions of people in America, there are some who inevitably will be predators and who will take advantage of others. The overwhelming majority obviously don't. The risk lies in not knowing whether you will bump into the bizarre exception to the normal rule of human kindness in such situations. But that risk, together with the alarmist publicity and paternalistic laws that can accompany it, have little to do with why far fewer people are hitchhiking now than they did back in the day. People are strongly affected by their peers and by what they are doing. Then they tend to do the same. In that older era, there was a huge social push to get out on the road in all sorts of ways and hitchhiking took wing as a direct result of that push. Now that is gone. There is no strong peer influence pushing people in that direction. There is nothing cool or adventuresome in the car culture, at least not for many. And so hitchhiking, at least in America, is left for those who do it out of necessity and for the remaining few who truly enjoy interacting with strangers. For most people, it is a brush-off item that they would never consider. After all, "nobody is doing it."