Hitchhiking (also known as thumbing or hitching) is a means of transportation that is gained by asking people, usually strangers, for a ride in their automobile or other road vehicle. The latter may require many rides from different people. A ride is usually, but not always, free. Yet whilst it is true that there are a lot less of us thumbing on the roads than there used to be, in many years of hitching I've never once been left stranded. It's important to put these figures from surveys in perspective - one car in ten still seem like pretty good odds to me. Besides, statistics don't always tell the real story.
Some years ago I hitched from one town to another while serving as a corper, an hour drive which took me two hours. I chatted with an engineer about cuts to the sciences, encouraged someone to take to the road themselves, and had an hour's lecture on how to make my own diesel from waste material. There aren't many forms of transport where you find all that. And regardless of these pleasures, hitchhiking should be thriving. With petrol prices rising weekly, people struggling to make ends meet, record youth unemployment and an urgent need to cut carbon emissions, a revival seems to be long overdue. It happened in other countries; part of Cuba's solution to its oil crisis was a boom in hitching. It is illegal for a state vehicle to drive past a hitcher without stopping.
Hitchhiking goes as far back as the Bible. The apostle Philip thumbs a ride with an Ethiopian eunuch in his chariot. Halfway home Philip takes him down to a river and baptizes him, whereupon he disappears. (Acts 8: 26-39). The charioteer carries on his way 'full of joy' (Wechner, 2011). When you encounter a stranger, it suggests, you never know what you're going to get. Hitchhiking, with two or more strangers placed in an enclosed space for a length of time, is a particularly good symbol for this uncertainty.
THE terror of 80s and 90s horror movies is often partly credited with the demise in hitching. The best known is The Hitcher, starring Rutger Hauer as a psychotic and motiveless hitchhiker, pursuing a suitably tight-jeaned and wind-swept young man. It is his very lack of motive that makes him terrifying. The idea now is that strangers are unknowable. You cannot risk trusting them, because you cannot understand them.
But are we more scared of strangers than we used to be? It seems more complex than that, for hitchhiking is not dead, just woefully under practiced. A friend recently carried out a study of a hundred lifts and found no shortage of people ready to stop. Their average wait was 24 minutes, not much more than a bus.
On the road
Perhaps it is the hitchers that are the ones that are scared of strangers, rather than the drivers. What if my generation, the twenty-somethings - the supposedly tough and fearless youth - are the ones too scared to relinquish their control?
Certainly there is a risk in hitchhiking, for both the hitcher and the hitched. Pretending there isn't is facile. But hospitality can only be rendered risk free by vetting one's guest so carefully that all possibility of hospitality is lost. There is something to be said for risks that are worth taking. The first rule of adventurous traveling: Things are almost never as bad as your mother thinks.
The second rule of adventurous traveling: The "almost never" exceptions can be pretty bad.

[b]This is not an intellectual argument, but a practical one. Stick out your thumb and see what happens. Take a car off the roads, save yourself money, and give someone the opportunity to show their hospitality. Hitch to [/b]work one day. Find someone who has hitchhiked before, and go with them. And, if you can find them, stop and pick someone up. Without beginning to cultivate a deep empathy for the stranger, and without learning to trust the unpredictable nature of the world, I find it hard to see what else we can achieve.
The apparent lack of goodwill towards hitchhikers contrasts sharply with goodwill who have broken down. Drivers would stop to help a motorist but only if comfortable that it was safe and that they could help .Hitchhiking is the cheapest form of transport and the 'greenest' form of road transport but sensible precautions should be taken. Hitchhike in pairs and tell a friend or relative of your route. Harness technology to stay safe too - when you get into a car, announce that you're "just going to text the car details to my partner" or whoever. http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_make_a_difference/culture_change/1043670/hitchhiking_the_greenest_form_of_transport_that_nobody_uses.html if you have ever had the opportunity of hopping into a moving truck or train esp as a youth or you gotten a lift for example from church after a sunday service, you have actually hitchhiked.hey people was your experience joyful and memorable or not? please do share with us .happy reading to y`all .Thank you