Context 

Ridesharing practices, especially hitchhiking, are usually portrayed by mass-media in West Europe and USA, in association with freedom, unconventional discoveries, self-discovery, coming of age, and unpredictability. In Romania, as well as in other parts of the world, they are part of a daily necessity for people without cars. The principles of American hitchhiking for example, were never copied exactly, thus having its own expressions. It is called autostop and the most important difference is that a gift-exchange is present, whether monetary, bartered, or in-kind payments – which usually covers only a small part of the journey and is perceived as normative. Other common names used convey the idea of an opportunity, or of a good deal, for instance ˝at an occasion ̋ or ˝at a car˝. While hitchhiking is unorganised ridesharing, carpooling is usually organised whether through digital platforms or right on the margins of the streets, near factories or office buildings. Experiences through Blablacar App and Facebook dedicated groups often follow, to some extent, the same principles of classic hitchhiking. The variation of terms and concepts in the shared mobilities studies are of course vast and sometimes unclear, but the article will discuss the most used such forms of mobilities: hitchhiking and carpooling.

I define ridesharing as travelling from one place to another, based on sharing a car with one or more strangers with the same itinerary and where a gift-exchange is present. Belk (2007) describes the process of sharing an altruism act where an individual can share not only things or places but also time, ideas or values. This may be extended to hitchhiking and corpooling. Through sharing a trip, participants are in a “win-win” situation because they can also share parking fees, oil expenses or other car-related expenses. In contrast, other so-called ridesharing platforms such as Uber or Bolt are falsely considered part of the broad concept of sharing economy. Borrowing the concept from Belk (2014), I consider them “pseudo-sharing”.

The individuals who participate in ridesharing in Romania are of all ages, sexes, ethnic majority or minorities. Most people waiting for spontaneous or organised rides are commuters – also known as ˝navetiști˝, a word filled with significance – and the people who must travel often to cities near their village. These individuals are going daily or frequently to work, school, universities, or public institutions. Their reasons to use such practices are most of the time similar. 

My interest in shared trips dates back in the 2000 when as a child I was frequently exposed to situations where my family would give lifts to thumb-travellers. The act was similar everytime, following precise rules and patterns. Specific ways of doing things were defining this social practice at the margins of the streets. Years have passed by and in 2018 I’ve started to research hitchhiking in-depth. For 5 years I travelled around 13.000 km, collecting 138 hitchhiking experiences as a passenger or as a driver. I used ethnographic field work, informal interviews, participative observation, and netnographic analysis. 15 unstructured interviews and 40 field interviews, that is engaging in small talk about hitchhiking during travelling. My main field site was located in Romania on the section of the road between Cluj-Napoca and Suceava, covering about 300 km of the European Route 58 (E58) and 3 counties: Suceava, Bistrița-Năsăud and Cluj. Piatra Fântânele is a hitchhiking place situated on this road, from where many departures and arrivals were made. A second field site consisted of Narciselor Street from Bacău, a city in east Romania. Finally, a third one was a region in South Europe that covers the common state borders between: Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

Road mobility: shared carriages and digitally prearranged rides

The word ridesharing is more and more used in the study of automobility, due to the rise of new technologies and human behaviours. To understand it, in the following lines I will portray a visual example taken from art – of a ride at the beginnings of shared mobility – and then I continue with briefly describing the formation of ridesharing in the context of road mobility. 

The beginning of the movie ˝The Great Silence˝ directed by Sergio Corbucci in 1968 shows the image of a shared ride in a closed horse carriage which was on its way to a town named Snowy Hill. During the ride, a sheriff who was lost in the middle of wilderness stopped it to get a lift. He stepped in and travelled with another ˝hitchhiker˝, sharing the interior space in an awkward silence. Beyond the beautiful cinematographic images, this scene makes us suspect that sharing rides were common when natural locomotion systems were pulled by animals such as horses, elephants, or camels. At the beginning of the 20th century, after the introduction and widespread application of Fordism, societies changed through mechanisation of production. Standardisation gradually changed the way people understood notions of space and time and road infrastructure developed, generating interconnected cities and regions which previously were less connected. With these changes, road mobility became something indispensable for many families of different social classes. After sharing, for a long time, carriages forming outside villages, people continued to use the opportunity offered by faster vehicles to get to different destinations. The mass production of car series was a turning point and hitchhiking appeared as a natural necessity-based mode of transportation.

However, ridesharing originated in the USA in the 1920s as a controversial practice associated with privileged youth. The reasons for hitchhiking are similar to the ones we find nowadays: economic necessity, an adventurous spirit, or a combination of both. Schlebecker (1958) argues that young boys, college students, were seeking lifts to go to beaches or other recreational places, but they were not the only ones. Veterans of the first world war were also seeking lifts during weekends. The practice was interpreted subjectively by police patrol. In other countries such as Canada, hitchhiking was prohibited, but not policed. At the beginning, in the attempt to regulate this new practice, some governments created distinctions between deserving and undeserving ridesharing. Hitchhiking was associated with road beggars, youth alienation or criminality, but carpooling (made through car-clubs) was a strategic way of promoting and organising shared rides. 

In Europe Rinvolucri (1974) traces ridesharing back to the First World War when the soldiers of the British forces were ˝lorry-hopping˝ to football games in France. The term got into the vocabulary of British people only in 1930, a time when hitchhiking was already common practice among college or university students.

Between 1930 and 1940, during the Great Depression in America, more and more people were opting for hitchhiking in search of jobs. They were called thumb wagers and they were perceived as seeking work opportunities. In the context of a collapsing economy populist messages of civic responsibility started to be visible even on the road, where motorists were encouraged to pick up hikers. Messages that can be considered part of a sustainable behaviour nowadays were at that time propaganda: “Fill those empty seats, CAR-sharing is a must” or “Fill up that back seat! – Share the ride so you can get the gas and tires you need”. Such messages were also visible during World War II in the USA. Through posters, government agencies were calling for patriotic sentiments, empathy for hitchhikers, especially those in army uniforms. Some of the messages were even telling Americans that if they carpool, they will win the war. Finally, there were even posters using enemies like Hitler to make people use carpools and thus maximise the fear of driving alone.  

Between 1960 and 1980, sharing a ride became again a statement of anti-societal rules showing that such practice was used as a political tool when needed. In contrast, organised ridesharing practices during the 1970s emerged from the gasoline shortage which forced the US government to promote carpooling again. Companies like 3 M and Chrysler had to provide organised carpooling with vans, to help employees commute from work and home (Furuhata et al., 2013). The creation of a ridesharing system was common in numerous countries during these years. If it is not regulated by the state, then the people in need were there to act on their own, without the help of authorities. A similar case of ridesharing construction took place in Ireland during IRA conflicts in 1969, in Belfast, as presented in The Patriot Game movie, directed by Arthur Maccaig in 1979. The city government banned city buses but three days later local people went to bring back taxis, so they formed a false taxi association that was working as a self-help organisation. This was a needed solution limited by the state against the will of its citizens.

Similar to trends in other countries, the history of hitchhiking in Romania is strongly linked to the number of available vehicles per individual. There is no public data available about the origins of hitchhiking culture in Romania but we can assume that the trajectories are associated with a myriad of factors starting from communities based on solidarity among people from the same social group. References of the word hitchhiking are starting to be available in books and popular stories during the socialist era 1947-1989, at the same time with the industrialization of the cities and with the strategies to integrate rural farmers into the working class or proletariat. The usage of the Romanian word autostop (the correspondent for hitchhiking) is linked with activities that were often censored or closely monitored by the state institutions, activities that were ˝outside the norm˝, symbols of other societies, and perceived as dangerous (such as listening to foreign rock bands, wearing jeans and so on) . 

During my fieldwork, respondents would often remember the smell of the petrol in the vehicle, the unbearable reek of a bus filled with working-class people after a day of work. They would also recall that there were simply not enough buses, thus leaving many with no choice but to go hitchhiking. One time during a ride between Piatra Fântânele and Vatra Dornei, I met Marian, a 60-year-old van driver, former worker in the metallurgy industry before 1990. He was nostalgic when talking about the crowded buses during the 1980s, and at the same time he criticised the lack of public transportation vehicles. Marian recalls the situation: ˝Yes, the bus stations outside cities where full of hitchhikers. They wouldn’t catch a place in the bus so they had to handle it on their own. Nowadays you can barely see a hitchhiker, everybody has a car˝. 

During the 1990s, there was a critical juncture in the culture of ridesharing. The ˝salvation˝ came with the help of Web 2.0, which enabled new features, a new behaviour on the internet. It opened the world to contribution and collaboration between users at a larger scale. The possibility of moving online, to create communities and to digitally arranged trips was a great opportunity for reinventing traditional ridesharing.

Digital ridesharing spaces emerged in Romania after 2000 through several local initiatives. Small scale websites were trying to reach as many users as possible in order to organise carpooling. They were not very successful, until Facebook dedicated groups were formed and until 2015 when Blablacar took control of the online shared rides. Blablacar is the most popular organised ridesharing app that connects drivers with passengers through a web platform that enables finding and offering idle seats in road vehicles with common itineraries. It is a carpool provider, a term that is not regulated or explained by any Romanian law, thus avoiding having an illegal status. The company puts emphasis on their positive impact (presenting reports like Zero Empty Seats) and on the benefits they bring to the community. Their official objective is to ˝create value for the members of our carpool community ̋ and the aim of the platform is to ˝connect people looking to travel long distances with drivers heading the same way, so they can travel together and share the cost˝ (Blablacar website in 2020). 

Is ridesharing more sustainable or just a breakdown solution?

Sustainability is often a concept placed next to ridesharing methods. In this sense, both organised and unorganised ridesharing are claimed to be solutions to slow down some problems like pollution, traffic congestion or fuel consumption (Belk, 2014b; Chesters & Smith, 2001; Cruz et al., 2016). Both traditional and app-based ridesharing “improves energy efficiency and reduces emissions because the drivers will travel to the destinations regardless of the presence of passengers” (Jin et al. 2018:6). Other scholars describe ridesharing as a green commute alternative because it reduces the need for owning a car: “The ecological benefits of sharing are often seen as obvious: secondary markets reduce demand for new goods, so footprints go down” (Schor 2014:6). 

Following my case studies, some companies in Cluj are trying to show that they are environmentally conscious by proposing their employees carpooling options. For instance, I found a similar approach used by an IT company with its headquarters in the city centre. Through road signs carpooling systems are promoted, part of the sustainable trend, part of the limited parking places. Their employees are encouraged to travel by public transportation, bikes, or shared vans for those living in the outskirts of the city. Their emphasis is more on reducing the carbon footprint. To this regard, the space in front of its building is dedicated to carpool, vanpool, low emitting, and fuel-efficient vehicles.

Another argument that promotes the sustainable dimension of ridesharing looks at increasing car seat occupancy as a measure for reducing air pollution and lowering emissions. In the last decades, some governments or private companies have tried proposing solutions for the decongestion of many important roads, through organised and formal ridesharing policies that would promote a higher seat occupancy. Some of them took it further and modified the material infrastructure of roads. It is the case of HOV lanes (meaning High Occupancy Vehicle Lane) in countries like Canada, some cities in the USA, Europe, China or Australia, specific lanes for public transportation, or specific places for ridesharing lifts. One study notes that: “Effective usage of empty car seats by ride-sharing may represent an important opportunity to increase occupancy rates and could substantially increase the efficiency of urban transportation systems, potentially reducing traffic congestion, fuel consumption, and pollution” (Agatz et al. 2012:1). Through such policies, ridesharing is promoted as an act of individual responsibility towards the environment, sometimes with great visible benefits, but in some cases, it is perceived as a limitation for mobility, and the social results are easy to detect. As Graham and Marvin (2001) noted when he was discussing electronically tolled highways or superhighways, these practices are clearly exclusionary, accentuating the splintering of urbanism. 

One such paradoxical case is present in Jakarta, Indonesia, one of the most traffic congested cities in the world. Here, the 3-in-1 rule is tricked by drivers to benefit from specific road infrastructure. After the introduction of this law in 2003, because of high social inequality, people from the margins of the society started soon to become professional passengers known as ˝jockeys˝. That is a person available for ˝rent˝ during a trip, so the journey is considered carpool. For small sums of money up to 1,20 US dollars, mothers with their small children would benefit from an income (Hanna, Kreindler & Olken, 2017). From an article from The Guardian, we have a similar image of such passengers. The description of the main photo sums up the situation at that time: ˝A woman carries her baby as she signals to show that she’s for hire as a ‘jockey’ to help drivers cheat a peak time traffic rule of three people to one car during rush hour in Jakarta, Indonesia˝ (The Guardian, 2016). 

However, going back to the Romanian case and analysing my interviews, the respondents never mentioned sustainable behaviour as their central motivation when travelling through ridesharing. Only after I asked some of them specifically, they would confirm a possible underlining drive, but not decisively, confirming that sustainability is an intrinsic factor. However, there is an observed difference between thumb-travellers and people using online ridesharing apps: for the latter, the sustainable factor is more prominent than for the former. This indicates that the narrative of a sustainable mode of transportation – promoted mostly by the companies that are controlling ridesharing apps – works as a marketing tool specific to the neoliberal context. 

We’ve seen that in different countries and different times, the state may encourage or criminalise ridesharing practices, but individuals are also creating such systems as acts of solidarity and mutuality in times of need. Hitchhiking and carpooling are ways of travelling through which the interior of a car is shared with people with similar itineraries. Although sometimes marketed under the “sustainability” umbrella, users don’t always see it as a sustainable act – or, not mainly as such. Their reasons to engage in organised or ad-hoc ridesharing include: convenience, comfort, sociability, community membership, predictability or economic exchange. As the results of my research, as well as other academic studies point out, when present, the sustainable factor is an intrinsic and underlining one, that needs to be researched in more depth.