Hitchhiking!

What is it? What's going on?

I hitched for the first time in 2022. At the time, people I asked either said "it won't work", or "you'll get killed". I'm writing this blog post to inform everyone that I am not dead.

Generically, hitchhiking (or in French, "le Stop") is asking strangers for lifts. Usually, by standing at the side of the road with your thumb out, sometimes with a sign expressing where you want to go (important for longer journeys).

Rather than trying to summarise my thoughts into a quotable statement, or boiled down retrospective on my hitchhiking adventures, I thought it'd be fun to let you explore them. I've made a clickable map, filled it with the journeys I've taken (only in the UK so far!), and written a bit for each stage of the journey about who picked me up. Hopefully, from clicking around, you get some ideas about hitchhiking, whether society is (still) kind, and about talking to strangers in general.

So... here's the map! (scroll into view)

list of trips

1 Birmingham -> Hull
2 Birmingham -> Leeds
3 Birmingham -> Liverpool
4 Birmingham -> Glasgow
5 Hull -> London
6 London -> Hull
7 London -> Sheffield
8 London -> Sheffield
9 The Peaks (Bamford) -> Sheffield
10 Sheffield -> Hull
11 Sheffield -> Dublin -> Belfast

each of these is a separate trace on the above map. Click the "show on map" button to show the popup for each specific sub-trip.

	trip label	total trip distance (km)
1	1.1 Tamworth -> Woodall Northbound	180
	1.2 Woodall Northbound -> Hull
2	2.1 Tamworth -> Tibshelf Northbound	150
	2.2 Tibshelf Northbound -> Leeds
3	3.1 Frankley Northbound -> Hilton Northbound	125
	3.2 Hilton Northbound -> Keele Northbound
	3.3 Keele Northbound -> Liverpool
4	4.1 Frankley Northbound -> Charnock Richard Northbound	400
	4.2 Charnock Richard Northbound -> Hamilton
5	5.1 North Ferriby -> Doncaster North	320
6	6.1 London Gateway Services -> Ferrybridge	320
	6.2 Ferrybridge -> Hull
7	7.1 London Gateway Services -> Trowell Northbound	225
	7.2 Trowell Northbound -> Sheffield (Meadowhell)
8	8.1 London Gateway Services -> ?? -> ?? -> Sheffield (Meadowhell)	225
9	9.1 The Peaks (Bamford) -> Sheffield	16
10	10.1 Sheffield Parkway -> Woodall Northbound	110
	10.2 Woodall Northbound -> Hull
11	11.1 Manchester Road -> Cutthroat Bridge	367
	11.2 Cutthroat Bridge -> Ladybower Reservoir
	11.3 Ladybower Reservoir -> Denton Rock
	11.4 Denton Rock -> Lymm
	11.5 Denton Rock -> Northock Hall
	11.6 Northock Hall -> Bangor
	11.7 Bangor -> Holyhead Ferry Terminal
12	12.1 Dublin N1 -> Castlebellingham	166
	12.2 Castlebellingham -> Abbey Centre

How Hitchhikers Cope with the Pressures and Perceived Dangers of Hitchhiking by Society
A Literature Review and Qualitative Interviews
Iris Veldwijk
source

a book by mindofahitchhiker that talks about the false-or-not perception of the danger of hitching

An Informal History of Hitchhiking
JOHN T. SCHLEBECKER
source

a very old paper from 1958,

Hitchhiking
Cultural Inroads
Patrick Laviolette
source

a long monograph about hitchhiking by a particularly sarcastic-sounding and long-word-loving academic,

Hitchhiking travel in China: Gender, agency and vulnerability
Xiongbin Gao, Scott Cohen, Paul Hanna
source

an examination of hitchhiking in China,

Staring and Compliance:
A Field Experiment on Hitchhiking
MARK SNYDER, JOHN CKETHEK, AND KRISTINE KELLER
source

a short paper on the importance of eye contact while hitchhiking

THE DEATH AND LIVES OF HITCH BOT: THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A HITCHHIKING ROBOT
David Harris Smith, Frauke Zeller
source

a short paper about a little robot that could,

hitchhiking!?

What is it? What's going on?

list of trips

Library