> “Two young Englishwomen were hitchhiking when the car they were in hit a tree”; “Yvette and Nicole (both twenty years old) were secretly hitchhiking when they died on the way to their vacation spot.”5 In the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when road fatalities were reaching unprecedented heights, sensationalist headlines and brief news items suggested that it might be unwise to entrust one’s life to an unknown driver.

today, specifically women are usually terrorised about travelling alone with stories of rape or rape-murder, especially if they're young and pretty, with the thinly-veiled implication that if you dare to have adventures you're basically asking for it (there's an excellent feminist webcomic about this topic and because all search engines are broken it took me 20 minutes to find it, only by accident because someone reshared a page on facebook, so please go read it: https://homeiswheretheinternetis.blogspot.com/2014/04/dont-let-fear-stop-you-from-traveling.html ).

it's curious to think that in the 50s and 60s, the way they terrorised women was with the threat of *bad drivers*. I guess car accident is a higher threat model than random stranger rapist after all  not the least because like, someone who's driving is in a inherently vulnerable position, as long as you're willing to risk a car crash for both.