I regularly pick people up, but wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve really given it thought.
For me - I’m a 6’2” bearded dude. I drive a Jeep and almost never have the doors or top on it in the summer. I’m also armed and have had some training.
Being in an open vehicle means that anyone around me in traffic can see what’s going on, so I’m reasonably confident a hitchhiker isn’t going to try to take me hostage or directly threaten me with a weapon. It also couldn’t be any better ventilated, so I’m able to pick people up whose “odor” would others make it difficult to get a ride.
I’ve probably picked up 100 or more hitchhikers at this point. I’ve had a couple that were obviously unhinged, more than a few people who were drunk or stoned to the point they had no business in public, and a surprising number of people who I would have never expected to take me up on my offer of a ride.
One of my favorite memories of this is when I found myself in Charlottesville, VA at about 1am, wide awake, in a growing snowstorm with nothing to do. My Jeep didn’t have doors or a top even though it was ~10ºF out. There was a little over a foot of snow on the ground, and the city buses had stopped as a result. I ended up driving back and forth all over downtown as the bars closed, taking college kids back to their homes when I found them stumbling through the snow trying walk back.
I often wonder how many of them woke up the next day questioning their own sanity. “How did I get home last night? I remember walking, then got a ride in a Go-Kart… Wait a sec - was that Hagrid driving!?”
I've been a hitchhiker and I've picked up hitchhikers though not in years as they're less common today where I live and I've been a parent and I won't pick up hitchhikers with my kids in the car. So while I was going to say "I don't think there's much risk" I guess I must admit I do acknowledge some risk involved, given that I won't do it with my kids aboard.
But overall hitchhikers are people just like you and me, the difference being they haven't got a car, obviously. I figure the worst that would happen is I'm robbed and my car stolen, which would stink but the risk is infinitesimal and the benefit I perceive in helping out my fellow human is worth it to me. Notably, I am male; my calculous would likely be different if I were female.
There's also the typical caveat of minding one's common sense & gut. If someone looks like a basket case I'm unlikely to pick them up, or if it's an odd hour/past dark, the area is remote etc. But someone on an busy onramp to I-40 during daytime, why not?
While hitchhiking, I was once picked up by a mother with her young children in the backseat. It seemed odd even to me that she would take such a risk with a stranger, but in the course of the drive she explained that her eldest daughter was a serial hitchhiker and that it gave her peace of mind to provide the sort of positive encounters that she hoped her daughter would experience.
I've experienced both sides, and been more afraid as a hitchhiker than as the driver, mostly from terrible driving vs. any direct bodily threat. I'm a large male too, though maybe always-connected & cell phones would actually make this safer for women?
A guy picked me up when I was hitchhiking out of Whitehorse, Yukon (or maybe it was Haines Junction?). I should have been suspicious since he had just left a bar (and for some reason had hundreds and hundreds of empty bottles in the back of his pickup truck — for recycling?).
Yeah, he's swerving on the highway. He even let me know the RCMP were very serious about drunk driving. I offered to drive but he declined my offer.
It was the only time I saw the Northern Light in full spectacle — he pulled over for that. Blew my mind (although, at the same time, I was running on very little sleep).
You just need to be prepared to out crazy whatever you encounter. My plan, if it ever went sideways, was to pin the throttle and take my hands off the wheel. Fortunately it never came to that.
