Hitchhiking Rides Dataset: Two decades of crowd-sourced records on stochastic traveling
Till Wenke

TL;DR
This paper introduces the largest structured dataset on hitchhiking rides collected over two decades, providing insights into its patterns, behaviors, and community dynamics, despite inherent biases.
Contribution
It presents and analyzes a comprehensive, crowd-sourced hitchhiking dataset, highlighting its origins, evolution, and key behavioral insights, advancing research on informal mobility.
Findings
Europe-centric distribution of rides
Seasonal hitchhiking patterns
Community-driven data collection dynamics
Abstract
Hitchhiking, a spontaneous and decentralized mode of travel, has long eluded systematic study due to its informal nature. This paper presents and analyzes the largest known structured dataset of hitchhiking rides, comprising over 63,000 entries collected over nearly two decades through platforms associated with hitchwiki.org and lately on hitchmap.com. By leveraging crowd-sourced contributions, the dataset captures key spatiotemporal and strategic aspects of hitchhiking. This work documents the dataset's origins, evolution, and community-driven maintenance, highlighting its Europe-centric distribution, seasonal patterns, and reliance on a small number of highly active contributors. Through exploratory analyses, I examine waiting times, user behavior, and comment metadata, shedding light on the lived realities of hitchhikers. While the dataset has inherent biases and limitations - such…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsTransportation and Mobility Innovations · Sharing Economy and Platforms · Digital Economy and Work Transformation
