Is hitchhiking in the USA recommended?

I hitchhiked across Australia and I survived

I mean you hitchhike at your own risk, regardless of safety tips. You never know if someone is going to kill you as soon as you get inside their vehicle or stalk you. Hitchhiking is illegal here but very very few people do it.

Goodness no USA people are nuts. Consider i’m from & live in the USA~ But seriously no, I wouldn’t reccommed hitchhiking anywhere.

Someone’s got balls! Ever heard of Ivan Milat before hitchhiking here??

Yes I have heard of Ivan Milat

Nope it isn’t, to many crazy and dangerous ppl out thr

No! There’s too many stories I’ve heard of people getting murdered when hitchhiking. I highly doubt too many people here would even give you a ride because of the crazy things that have happened. My grandma just told me one last night: An old lady was trying to get peoples attention on the side of the road and this guy would hide and as soon as someone would stop he would rob and kill them. My grandma works at a prison so, she knows tons of crazy stories. The US has too many insane people, lol. I would definitely not recommend it.

Look into the hostels set up exclusively for hitchhikers, a lot of my friends hitchhike and there are people all over the world that have a bed waiting for you so if you are avid about it dont let anything stop you. Just be ready to return the favor.

The problem is that you have no idea what the person giving you a ride is like. Chances are you will be finw but you might be the person who gets in the car of a serial criminal. Also, in the US few people will pick up hitchhikers fearing the hitchhikers might be criminals. In the 1970’s when I was walking along the road people would stop and offer me a ride even if I didn’t have my thumb out. In the 1980’s and on nobody offered me a ride.

i hitchhiked a about 8 or so years back it was a good time dangerous i guess. but was i worried not at all. it was something I’ll never forget.

hitchhiking is only illegal if that is what the cops can prove your doing. i was stopped several times by police when asked what i was doing i simply said I’m walking home. where is home? About 150 miles way why? the biggest issue is they don’t want you walking on the interstates. so i found country roads . but it ws a good time. other than the idea it was 105 out side i enjoyed my self a lot

Sorry I didn’t see this sooner. The question is, recommended by whom? Yvonne’s answer, though popular, is simply mistaken. Many, MANY people have recommended hitchhiking in one place/time or another.

I first heard about hitchhiking from my older brother who at age 13 used to travel that way all around the suburban area where we lived then. But I didn’t know what it really meant until, when I was around 9 years old, my mom told me to wait patiently by the side of the road for her to return, and then she stepped out into the street and thumbed a ride the mile back to our house to get something she had forgotten to bring with us when we left. When I was 12, my parents instructed me to hitchhike to my religious school every afternoon when public school let out, because there was no bus.

I used to stand by the official hitchhiking signpost on my college campus to flag a ride into town. The Israeli government used to encourage drivers to pick up soldiers hitchhiking to and from their posts. My friends and I all hitchhiked frequently, and easily recommended it to anyone who asked.

I have hitchhiked well over 100,000 miles in my lifetime. To commute in and out of town, to get around in the city, to wander throughout the beautiful region where I grew up (northern New Mexico), to visit all 48 mainland states of the USA, and most dramatically, to travel in 1973-‘74 through six or eight countries of Europe and four in southern Asia (Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan). My last hitchhiking road trip was in the late ‘80s, between Boston and Santa Fe (maybe 4,000 miles?), and I sometimes hitched home from work as late as 1992 when the buses were few and far between.

The problem is, the culture has changed. It’s not that the risk is any greater now, but the manipulation of our fear of crime (that is, of each other) for political and entertainment purposes has made people much more afraid now either to hitchhike or to pick up hitchhikers. That makes it a lot harder to do, a lot slower moving. I think it’s really a shame, because I’ve never known a better way to get to meet an immensely broad variety of people and hang out with them long enough to get to know each other a little bit and learn how similar we all are and how intriguing our differences are.

Not that it was all utopian. I did get stuck out on the road in out of the way places sometimes, once in a Texas tornado. I spent a few nights in city jails for hitching in places where it was illegal (the state of California) or where pedestrians were not allowed to be (like on the interstate highway system). And I had a several scary encounters where I thought I was going to get beat up or worse - not so much for hitchhiking, but for being a skinny young long-haired hippie.

But I also got to speed from Oklahoma to Chicago in a souped-up race car, work with itinerant cherry pickers in Washington State and housepainters in Florida, of Navajo Indians, trek barefoot through the Smokey Mountains National Forest after my shoes got stolen, relax in the hay in the back of a horse-drawn Tzigany (Gypsy) dairy wagon, learn Serbo-Croatian while there still was such a thing (now two separate nations and languages), dance to American 1950s rock’n’roll while talking international politics with patriotic young Yugoslavs while Tito was still alive, turn down an offer to ride camels across Iraq, learn to snorkel off the coast of Sharm el Sheikh, and be welcomed into the homes of Navajo Indians, a German ex-nazi, Muslim and Christian Pakistanis in Karachi, and much, much more. Not to mention a few exotic romantic interludes about which I shall say no more here… {;^)