Hitchhiking for the 21st Century

There comes a time when we have to accept that Eurostar has become an elite form of transport that is no longer generally affordable (£176 one way for the 6am train to Paris … I don’t think so, Eurostar).

There also comes a time when, as a Francophile and train nerd, I have to accept that even France’s rail network has its limits. No matter how much I stare at the timetable, no train will appear that can get me from the region of Suisse Normande to St Malo on a Friday evening without having to first go east to Paris and then come back west again to the Breton Coast. With no bus service that evening either, I was potentially stranded in Caen while my partner was hanging out in a posh hotel on the beach.

Now was the time to rethink hitching and all the horror stories about it that women have welded into our subconscious by anxious parents (and I should never have watched Rutger Hauer in ‘The Hitcher’, which did for car sharing what ‘Jaws’ did for my ocean swimming).

This, however, is the 21st Century, and while that doesn’t mean we lose the little alarms bells in our heads entirely, it does mean we have apps. BlaBlaCar, for example, is doing for car sharing what AirBnB has done for spare rooms. Started in France, it now covers 22 countries with over 100 million members, allowing people with cars to connect with passengers who need to travel in the same direction and share the journey.

For those who think society is catastrophically breaking down, be comforted by the knowledge that there is a high degree of trust in these online relationships, with the usual star ratings and feedback facilities to give added confidence. BlaBla work hard at overcoming our innate anxieties about getting into a car with strangers. In a recent internal report, 88% of their members say they trust other BlaBla members, which is not far below the 94% and 92% trust we have in family and friends respectively. Work colleagues only come in at 58% trust which begs the question why anyone feels comfortable car-pooling to work.

Setting up an account in ten minutes, I find Tania driving from Caen to St Malo at roughly the time I needed and who could meet me at the station where I was arriving by bus from Clécy that evening. With some judicious re-arranging of suitcases and dog accessories, my backpack is squashed into the boot of a spacious Corolla, and I slide into a seat in the back. Two other young women are taking up the spare seats, making it four complete strangers meeting in Caen, trusting we will all be at the station on time, and trusting that none of us will become Rutger Hauer in whack-job mode.

I do, however, become very conscious that I have 25 years on all of them, that my French is terrible, and that they smell very nice. I, on the other hand, look like a woman who has been camping for four days, walked 20 kilometres to get to a bus stop in the heat and rain, and who now has that faint smell of damp sheep about me from the merino thermals I’m wearing.

After obligatory ‘bonjours’, we are mostly in silence. Passenger 2, next to me in the back, puts her airpods in. I stare out the window. Time passes. Inevitably the passengers have no control over the car play-list but I have now caught up on some of the latest in French rap. We also have no control over the driver’s abilities, and I would suggest Tania stop chewing her fingernails and keep both hands on the wheel, and perhaps could smooth out those lane changes a little, but we arrive in St Malo in one piece.

There is some negotiation over drop off points. Passenger 1 leaves us on the outskirts of town, but as it turns out Passenger 2 also needs a street near the beach so I am delivered two doors from my hotel.

While the train option would have been over £100 and taken seven hours, my 2.5 hour car share cost £12.50, two other passengers also got to where they needed to go, Tania covered her costs, and we helped out the environment a little bit. More importantly, sharing the voyage reminds us that strangers are not always scary people. If the worst that happens is you end up sharing a car with someone vaguely smelling of sheep then it’s not a bad way to travel.