First thing that comes to mind when you think of the 1970s

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Nowadays, hitchhiking is perceived as dangerous, and few drivers are willing to pick someone up. Police departments discourage it, and many states explicitly ban it. Most hitchhikers have no other options, and do so as a last resort.

"Dating back to the Depression and World War II, it used to be very normal to see someone sticking their thumb out and pick them up," says Alan Pisarski, a transportation researcher. "We lost that somewhere along the way."

For people too young to remember the age of hitchhiking, it brings up a perplexing question: what happened?

Most experts agree that one of the biggest factors in the decline of hitchhiking has nothing to do with fear of crime. "Probably the most important thing is the huge growth we've seen in car ownership," says David Smith, a British sociologist who's studied hitchhiking trends.

Since the 1960s, the percentage of US households that own cars has steadily increased — and the proportion of those with multiple cars has grown even faster:

While hitchhiking isn't explicitly banned on all interstates, laws prohibit pedestrians from walking along side them, so getting a ride is much more difficult. Motorists that previously passed through small towns on state routes now whiz across the country on highways, stopping mostly at exits or rest stops.

Meanwhile, a few states have made hitchhiking entirely illegal, while others have banned it on highways. The vast majority of states permit it, but have laws prohibiting hitchhikers from standing on the road itself (some permit them to stand on the shoulder, while others are unclear):

Starting in the 1960s and '70s, some of the first laws against hitching were passed, and local and federal law enforcement agencies began using scare tactics to get both drivers and hitchhikers to stop doing it. This 1973 FBI poster, for instance, warned drivers that a hitcher might be a "sex maniac" or a "vicious murderer":

Other campaigns emphasized the risks to women — and implicitly suggested they'd be blamed for anything that happened to them. "Police officers at Rutgers University handed out cards to hitchhiking women that read, 'If I were a rapist, you’d be in trouble,'" Ginger Strand, author of Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, recounted in a recent New York Times op-ed.

Combine this with a handful of horror movies involving hitchhiking murderers, as well as high-profile murder victims who'd been hitching, and you get the now-dominant perception that hitchhiking is simply too risky too try.

In her op-ed, Strand goes on to note that we've never had good evidence that hitchhikers — or the drivers who pick them up — are particularly likely to be raped or murdered. One of the few studies on the topic, conducted by the California Highway Patrol in 1974, concluded that "the results ... do not show that hitchhikers are over represented in crimes or accidents beyond their numbers."

The study did find that women were much more likely than men to be raped while hitchhiking, a fact that's certainly still true today.

Our fear of hitchhiking might also fit into a more general fear of strangers that has blossomed in American society over the past few decades. Parents instruct their children never to talk to strangers, for instance — but in reality, the overwhelming majority of child abductions are committed by family members.

In much the same way, about 30,000 people die in car accidents every year, but the few dozen who are murdered along the highways make hitchhiking a much palpable threat than driving. Our perceived fear of hitchhiking has surpassed the actual risk of it. "There's a kind of safety bug that's taken over in society," Pisarski says. "We're much more reluctant to interact with strangers than before."