On August 1, hitchBOT, a robot that had successfully hitchhiked more than 10,000 km (6,213 miles) across Canada and northern Europe, was destroyed by unknown vandals in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood.
For a week, the robot’s violent decapitation was a favorite “news of the weird” story and a chance for commentators to warn of the dangers of hitchhiking.
As one commentator put it, “With hitchhiking so rare today, especially among non-sociopaths, it has increased the chance that a sociopathic hitchhiker will get picked up by a sociopathic driver.”
At the risk of revealing any hitherto-unrealized sociopathic tendencies, I want to speak in defense of hitchhiking and consider what its “death” means for our burgeoning sharing economy.
Hitchhiking Histories
I started picking up hitchhikers during my brief stint in graduate school.
I was living on the border of New York and Massachusetts in a town so tiny that it was a seven-mile drive to buy milk or gasoline. It was, as they say, centrally isolated, and anyone hitchhiking during the upstate New York winter was doing so out of necessity, not on a lark.
Some of my neighbors simply didn’t have cars. Giving rides was a low-cost way of meeting people in my community and doing a good deed.
It’s something I continue today on the Massachusetts side of the border, in Berkshire County, where I now live. I’ve learned a great deal from my riders: how easy it is to lose your driver’s license and how expensive it can be to get it back; and what being without a car does to your financial, health and romantic prospects when you live in a rural area.
I acknowledge I’m in a privileged position – I’m male, large enough to be physically intimidating and well-off enough to afford the extra fuel and time giving a lift may entail – but I’ve never had a ride that made me feel uncomfortable or endangered.
The fact is, hitchhiking used to be a normal thing to do.
During World War II, gas rationing turned picking up hitchhikers into a patriotic duty, helping bring fighting men to and from their bases.
