Freakonomics Radio - 44. Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?

Episode Date: October 10, 2011

Did we needlessly scare ourselves into ditching a good thing? And, with millions of cars driving around with no passengers, should we be rooting for a renaissance?

I was out in California not long ago, and I saw somebody doing something that I hadn't seen done in a long time. Something I used to do during college, out of necessity. What do you think it was? Go ahead, think about it. Now, I posted this riddle on the Freakonomics blog. You want to hear some of the answers I got? Okay, here we go. Eating ramen noodles. Using a phone book. Hanging wet laundry on a clothesline.

Inserting a floppy disk. All right, those are all perfectly fine answers, but not what I'm looking for. Jason, what are we watching here? This is the beginning of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where these kids are going to visit a graveyard, and they pick up a pretty scraggly-looking hitchhiker. They make hitchies. Jason Zinnemann is a theater critic for The New York Times, and he's the author of a book called Shock Value, which is about the horror films of the 1970s. So in this movie, a van full of teenagers decide,

after some debate, to pick up a hitchhiker. He just got off his shift at the slaughterhouse, so his face is streaked with blood, and he's talking about bludgeoning cows to death. It's pretty clear by now that we're wishing that he hadn't been picked up. Pretty much, yes. They'll throw nothing away. They use them. There's not really any good scenario we can imagine coming out of this. We're wishing that he hadn't been picked up. Pretty much, yes.

There's not really any good scenario we can imagine coming out of this. No, no, it's true. It only gets worse. It only gets worse. Now, let me just say this. I hate scary movies. I'd never watch one for pleasure, but this is research. It grew out of that trip to California where I saw that thing I hadn't seen in a while. I called up Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author. Turns out he had just had the same thought. So just yesterday, I was driving down the road in a resort in the Wisconsin Dells. And there were five kids who were waiting for the bus

to come and pick them up. And as I drove by, they stuck out their thumbs as if they were hitchhiking. And the thing that I thought was, how do these kids even know what that means? When's the last time anybody saw a hitchhiker on the road? I haven't seen a hitchhiker on the road in 20 years. And if somehow the idea of sticking your thumb up in the air,

even for these five-year-old kids, was still part of their psyche. But it makes you wonder, why did hitchhiking disappear? From APM American Public Media and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, where have all the hitchhikers gone? Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. All right, so if that's our question, where did all the hitchhikers go? That doesn't seem very hard to answer, does it?

Let's go back to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The hitchhiker, the guy who works at the slaughterhouse, now he's pulled out a switchboard. Ah, now here's where he crossed by. He cuts them. This is why. Okay, I'm going to. That's enough. That's the final straw.

You cut the guy, and he gets kicked out. And Franklin's arm is just bleeding like a. Franklin, it's just a little cut. You know, it's. Yeah, that's it. Hitchhiking died off because it's dangerous. If you hitchhike, you will die. That's the lesson we've learned, at least from horror movies and newspaper headlines. Here's Levitt again. anybody thought there were homicidal maniacs who were killing hitchhikers or hitchhikers killing people to pick them up, then certainly that would have the kind of chilling effect on a market that very few things could have.

That's right. Levitt, the economist, thinks of hitchhiking as a market, much like any other. Hitchhiking is a classic example of what economists call a matching market, where there's a person who wants a ride and this person who's willing to give a ride. And there's actually usually typically no money change hand. So somehow there are people getting benefit on both sides of the transaction. The 50s, the 60s, maybe even the 70s, there were some sort of equilibrium in which there were a set of people who wanted to hitchhike and there were a set of people who were willing to pick

them up. And somehow that equilibrium got destroyed. So the question is, what happened to the equilibrium? The assumption is that hitchhiking was so dangerous that people just wised up and stopped doing it. But how dangerous was it? We went looking for data on hitchhiking itself and on the violence associated with it. And we found pretty much nothing, at least no worthwhile data. So how common was hitchhiking violence? Did we maybe overreact? Do you remember a few years back when the media talked about the summer of the shark, all those scary stories about horrible, disfiguring shark attacks? Now, guess how many fatal shark attacks there were that year, the whole year around the world? Go ahead, guess. All right. The actual number was

four. There were probably more people killed by TV news vans going to cover all the shark attacks, right? But when something is really frightening, we get a little bit number blind. With something like hitchhiking, it might take just one story. I woke up in the morning. It was just a gorgeous day. The wildflowers were out. The trees, you know, are all sprouted all their leaves. The grass is green because it's spring and it hasn't dried up or anything yet. It was just so gorgeous. That's Colleen Stan.

It was May 19th, 1977. I had just turned 20 in December and I was very young and had a very carefree spirit about me. And I was quite impulsive. Stan was living in Eugene, Oregon, and she was planning to visit a friend in Westwood, California, about 360 miles to the south. But her car wouldn't start. So she decided to hitchhike. She got a ride with some truckers who were hauling grape juice. They let her off in Red Bluff, California, about an hour and a half from her friend's

house. The truckers even gave her a gallon of juice when they dropped her off. She put out her thumb again. A car stops, and there's like five guys in it. And I said, thanks, but no thanks, you know. So they went on their way. Her next ride was a blue Dodge Colt. It was a young couple inside with a baby. Looked safe enough. So Stan got in the car. It was a very warm day because it was May and Red Bluffs in the valley and it's very warm there. It can get, in the summer times, it can get like 115 there, you know, so it's a very warm place.

And so it was a warm day and I was thirsty thirsty from traveling, and I had taken the juice, and I had tipped it up to take a drink. And about the same time I tipped it up, the driver presses on the accelerator and jets out back onto the highway to take off. Well, this caused the juice to pour all down me. So I was a little irritated with him at this point. And I remember I looked up to the front, to the rear-view mirror, and he's looking in the rear-view mirror, and it gave me like a chill down my spine.

The man, whose name was Cameron Hooker, and his wife, Janice, wound up kidnapping Colleen Stan. They held her captive for more than seven years. They did a variety of horrible things to her. Finally, in 1984, she escaped. Hooker was sentenced to 104 years in prison. His wife got immunity for testifying against him. It became a big media story. The message was clear. This is why people shouldn't hitchhike, because when you get into a

car with someone, you are literally handing your life over to them. It's just, it's not worth it. It's too dangerous. Because you can look at someone, you can look at the situation and evaluate it, just like I did, and say, well, this looks like a safe ride. But you don't know what the intent is in someone's heart because they don't show that on the outside, and you don't know. And it's just not worth it. Because life's too valuable to just give it away like that. You can hardly blame Colleen's stand for feeling this way.

But how common are these really bad hitchhiking outcomes? Again, we really don't know, but life is all about trade-offs. Every time you do anything, you consider the trade-off. Should four fatal shark attacks each year keep everyone out of the ocean? Apparently not. But what number would? 40? 400? 4,000? What happens when you start letting relatively small numbers balloon into such a large fear? My father was the kind of person who would stop and help anybody. That's Bill James. He's the guy who helped revolutionize the field of baseball statistics. And he likes writing about crime, too. His latest book is called Popular Crime. James was born in 1949 in Kansas. One time with two small kids in the car late at

night coming back from a movie, we saw two black guys, two black adult males standing beside the road. And my father was not Spencer Tracy. I mean, he was not a violent racist, but he was a man of his generation, and he had the racist attitudes that were very common in his generation. Nonetheless, we stopped, we asked them if they needed a ride, and we took them where they needed to go. And the reason why is you just did. It was in the time and place where I grew up, if you saw somebody in need of a ride, you gave them a ride. As James got older, that changed. He remembers hearing PSAs on the radio

warning drivers not to pick up hitchhikers. Here's good advice for the cross-country motorist. Although it may seem a kind act, it is not a wise act to pick up hitchhikers indiscriminately. In retrospect, he says, hitchhiking took the blame for crime in general, an attribution problem, as James calls it. Here, he uses a baseball analogy to explain. In baseball, for many years, people believed that baseball was 75% pitching. And the essential reason that they believe this is that they credit the pitcher with wins and losses. And if you credit the pitcher with winning and losing the game,

it becomes a tautology that the pitcher is always responsible for winning and losing the game. And it creates the illusion that the pitcher is responsible for much more than he actually is. If you have a certain number of violent people running around hitchhiking, the fewer other people you have running around hitchhiking, the fewer other people you have running around hitchhiking, the more dangerous it becomes to pick up a hitchhiker. It drove itself out of existence. Basically, nobody hitchhikes anymore, and the practice has all but disappeared. My point about it was, what's really the social value in this?

I mean, the hitchhiking is economically efficient because it puts more people in a car. The real danger was not hitchhiking is economically efficient because it puts more people in a car. The real danger was not hitchhiking. It was the fact that you have a certain number of random crazy people who will hurt you. As long as you have the same number of random crazy people, you have the same number of violent crimes. And eliminating hitchhiking doesn't, in my opinion, do anything to change that. So it was a social change that protects the individual. I mean, I wouldn't pick up hitchhikers either. I'm not nuts. I do that to protect myself. But protecting myself has no value to the society.

So the demand for hitchhiking fell because of fear, a breakdown in trust, a selfishness, whatever. But maybe those aren't the only reasons demand fell. Maybe it fell because supply rose. The supply, that is, of transportation. Coming up, should there be a hitchhiking renaissance? It saves me about $20 a day in commuting costs. From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Did you ever hitchhike, Levitt? I did not hitchhike. I was just a little bit too young. By the time I was 15, I think hitchhikers had pretty much disappeared.

Well, not quite. I was hitchhiking then. When I was about 14 or 15, I started thumbing a ride most mornings before school, in the dark, to get to my job in town stocking shelves. I hitched all during college, all over the South, and a couple times from North Carolina to upstate New York and back. It was a pretty simple calculation. I wanted to get somewhere,

and I couldn't afford a car. I mean, why else would anyone hitchhike? Do you want to go halfway, or do you want to wait for a lift? I'd go halfway. All right. Are there good hitching spots there? Do you know? Here are a few hitchhikers we found out in Oregon. There were three of them.

Teriani, a guy named Stove, and their friend George Jamat. So I'm George Jamat, and I have an engineering degree that I only sometimes use. But my real passion and addiction is travel, well, and fixing things. George has hitchhiked a good bit in about 10 foreign countries and all over the U.S. So you do hitchhiking because you want to, not because you have to, really, right? Almost always, yeah. Almost always. So you're a 25-year-old American with an engineering degree and parental support and all that kind of stuff who helped you buy a car, gave you a hand-me-down car, offered to buy you a train pass to get home, and you say, nah, you know, I just want to go down to the road and

put my thumb out. What does that say about you and folks like you in the hitchhiking community now who do it not out of necessity, but out of desire for experience? I think you just hit the nail on the head there is desire for experience. About me particularly, it's that I'm addicted to travel and novelty. And I definitely could not normally, you know, and, and sustainably extend my vacations and travels, uh, you know, as much as I have without hitchhiking. And, you know, of course my mom's going to buy me that one train ticket that one time, but I don't know, she might get tired of it after the second time, third time, fourth time. And I would hate to keep leaning on, you

know, the parents to keep buying me things, uh, all throughout life. And sort of like the, uh, I've, I've read that the, uh, hippies in the sixties were about, uh, just life experience and learning. And, uh, yeah, the, um, the other big motivation, uh, for a lot of us, uh, hitchhikers, the, the ones that I've talked to, is just learning other people's perspectives on life. And it's much easier, I think, to get a sort of feeling for how someone else lives quickly if you're riding in a car with them for hours. So a guy like George Gema hitchhikes not really because he needs to, but to get a sort of feeling for how someone else lives.

But what about all the people who might need to hitchhike out of necessity, but don't out of fear? On the other hand, maybe there's not as much need as we think. Clearly, people getting richer... That's Steve Levitt again. Did you hear what he said? Clearly, people getting richer and cars getting better made

has to be a big part of it because it's an extremely ineffective way to travel. Hitchhiking, it's slow, it's unpleasant, it's uncertain. And so if you can do something better, whether it's take a bus or take a plane or drive your own car, it's hard to believe there are many people who wouldn't prefer a different mode of transportation. So maybe hitchhiking started to disappear because fewer people needed a free lift.

Most reporters ask me, how do I get to work? And I tell them I walk about 30 feet from my bedroom to my office. This is Alan Pisarsky. He's what you might call a scholar of transportation behavior. He used to work for the U.S. Department of Transportation, and he wrote a series of books called Commuting in America. So we are in agreement that there used to be quite a bit of hitchhiking, although we don't know how much. We are in agreement that there's much less now, correct? Okay.

So we want to know, where did all those hitchhikers go? Why did so many people stop hitchhiking? I guess my reflex, statistical reflex, is the greater availability of automobiles. Well, the first part of in terms of driver's licensing is almost identical and almost ubiquitous. It's in the 92, 93 percentile for both men and for women. Okay, so a lot more people driving, but also, says Buzarski, there were a lot more cars. In 1969, only three in 10 households had more than one car. By 2009, six in 10. All of the really significant change occurred in the two and three car households. That's where you saw an explosion and all of

the growth. Okay, so you're telling me more driver's licenses, more cars. Talk to me about the cars themselves and longevity. I think that's an important component. One of the things that people I think don't recognize, one of the great technological changes that we've seen in America in the last 30 years is simply the longevity of the vehicle fleet. Back in the 60s, cars did not last all that long. Today, the average age of a vehicle in America is north of nine years. What that means is that it's entirely possible to buy a 10- or 12-year-old small car, perfectly serviceable, still functioning quite adequately, at a very reasonable cost. So the automobile in that sense has become much more accessible to many parts of the population.

I came down to this studio in a 14-year-old car. That makes sense. Cheap and easy car ownership helped drive down demand for hitchhiking, along with big changes in how we get around generally. The one is the advent of the interstate, which took people off of Main Street and onto roads where walkers are not permitted. And then, of course, deregulation of aviation in roughly 1980. That had an extraordinary effect on the price of air travel. And so, you know, that made it a whole lot cheaper than standing on a street corner with your thumb out. But here's something else worth thinking about.

If you care even a little bit about transportation, about the cost, the growing congestion and the risk of accident, about the carbon emissions from all those cars on the road, then consider this very sobering statistic. The average car commuting to and from work in the U.S. today rides around with about 80% of its passenger capacity empty. If our auto fleet were a bus or train fleet, it'd be considered a massive failure. One of America's greatest transportation resources are all those empty seats and automobiles traveling around America. I mean, it's a colossal resource that we do waste. Given that there is this massive inefficiency with all this empty capacity in cars, do you wish that hitchhiking could come back?

Yeah, I think I do. And I think that maybe we will see some opportunity for it with the new technologies and people being more willing to spend time with each other and maybe having some kind of a vetting system that says, this guy's okay, that puts people a little bit more at ease. And then that will, I hope, help people to be more comfortable with that kind of an arrangement. Nell City, Atomic. Nell City, Atomic. Dale City, Atomic. Slugging, for those who don't know,

is basically kind of an organized hitchhiking world. People just line up on the streets. Sometimes there's a sign, sometimes there's not. We sent Alan Pisarski out on the streets of Arlington, Virginia, where there's a healthy slugging scene. Everybody going to a certain area clusters together. Cars will come

along looking for people going their way so they can qualify to be on the HOV three lanes, which gives them a much faster ride down to the southern suburbs. We're looking now at about seven or eight cars lined up to pick up people. When we ask folks questions, we have to be pretty quick, a little bit nimble, almost like talking to people at a checkout line in the supermarket because they're more interested in getting in the car and heading home. I pull up every day. It says three for Roslyn, three for Pentagon, three for Crystal City. I might have to wait maybe

five, ten minutes for a rider and then I get on the road. It saves me about twenty dollars a day in commuting costs. There's a website that actually has etiquette rules on it. Don't talk to the driver unless they talk to you. Don't touch anything in the car unless you ask the driver. You get to ride in some pretty nice cars too. Don't eat or drink in the car unless you ask. It's a pretty nice little arrangement. Some people will talk to you the whole way down. Some people will just keep their mouth shut. I usually get home at the same time every day.

Slugging is a lot more organized than hitchhiking, and a lot of these people are government employees, so they're wearing suits and ID tags, so they don't exactly conjure the image of the slaughterhouse hitchhiker from Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the creepy couple who kidnapped Colleen Stan. Of course, the normal risks of auto travel still apply. I was a rider and the driver was falling asleep behind the wheel. So, you know, you have to try to, you know, wake up, you know, say, hey, either, you know, if you're going to fall asleep, let me out. I'll find a way home or, you know, try to keep your eyes open.

What are you scared of? Why? Are your fears rational or do you let the small likelihood of a terrible outcome stop you from doing things that you really want to do? You know what I think we fear most in this country? Strangers. We've done a great job through our media, our movies, even our politics, of convincing ourselves that strangers are dangerous. But if you look at the data, you might be surprised. Three of every four murder victims in this country knew their killer.

And of course, each of us knows a lot fewer people than there are strangers. More than 60% of rape victims knew their attacker. If you look at the data on missing children, you'll see that an incredibly small percentage of those incidents, way, way less than even one-tenth of one percent, are what we think of as the stereotypical kidnapping by a stranger. Now, how dangerous was hitchhiking? We may never really know, but almost certainly far, far, far less dangerous than we came to think of it. Are we worse off for abandoning it? That's what I asked Bill James. So there was an equilibrium that existed and then it was destroyed

in large part because of fear and the equilibrium went away and it's probably impossible to recreate. Do you think it'd be a good thing if that fear could be suspended, the equilibrium could be recreated, and hitchhiking could be reinvigorated? Yes, I do. And the reason I do is that we have a better society when we can trust one another. And wherever and whenever there's an evaporation of systems based on trust, I think there's a loss to society. I also think that one evaporation of trust in society tends to feed another, and that we would have a better society if we could, rather than promoting fear and working to reduce the places where terrible things happen, if we could promote trust and work on building societies in which people are more trustworthy.

I think we're all better off in a million different ways if and when we can do that. All right, so let's see. Our economy is still sputtering, which means money is tight for transportation and everything else. When we drive to work, 80% of our passenger capacity is wasted. And as Bill James puts it, a loss of trust means a loss for society. So if you're feeling a little bit patriotic today, if you're feeling a little optimistic, maybe a little bit adventuresome, go ahead. Stick your thumb out. Thank you. Bray Lamb, Colin Campbell, and Chris Bannon. Our interns are Jacob Berman and Ian Chant, and David Herman is our engineer. Special thanks to Kenneth Dallmeyer, Carla Norton, David Schultz, and Aaron Scott. If you want more Freakonomics Radio,

you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.