What do you think the percent that we make up?

[Deleted member 2626]

In* fuck these smartphones

 

[janktoaster]

(the original Bob Dylan version) apparently he wrote it and then never finished it

 

[Matt Derrick]

20,000 is a pretty generous number. i mean, it's impossible to tell, but i personally think it's no more than 5,000 people that are actively traveling right now.

so my guestimate answer to your original question of what percentage of americans are train hoppers... it's something like 0.0000002 percent. include other forms of travel (rubber tramping, sailing?) and it increases to maybe 0.000003 percent.

what would be neat is to have an improptu party/gathering/census. i don't know if anyone remembers "meet in st louis 6/6/06", but the way it was organized was that they started spreading the rumor that 'all the punx meet in st louis on 6/6/6" as far back as 2003. it was word of mouth only and hand written notes stuck on walls in punk houses. but it worked, i think about 150 punks/travel kids showed up in st louis and all sorts of scumfuckery went down and the cops came and arrested everyone.

so if stp did a party/census just to see how many people showed up (perhaps using the model above) maybe we could get a decent number counted while having a killer party as well.

 

[hobopoe]

This made me smile endlessly. Just brightened up a day.

 

[Cardboard]

So, I am curious. What percent of the population do you think people like us make up? People who willingly live like we do, or hop freight? Just curious. I am curious about what percentage in the U.S. and then the percentage in the world.

I think you might need to clarify this question before expecting any reasonable answer. People like us means people who use STP? I have only met a handful of people from STP, but I would hesitate to group myself to "we" with nearly anyone. The same with "live like we do"... Hop freight, thats a solid question, and I imagine that 20k might be reasonable, though i also imagine it is near impossible to say for certain.There isall types of people riding freight, and I think it is actually getting more and more trendy. I mean, look how many people on STP are here for "research", as in not actively traveling, or never having actually travelled.

 

[hobopoe]

I agree that the original post was vague, but I am actually going to refer to the above answers where this was further fleshed out. Thank you for your reply though. I can only agree about the thought of freight hopping becoming trendy, unfortunately. I am not sure if it is good or bad that this is happening, but I agree it is becoming trendy.

 

[treatment]

I didn't really read past the first few posts in this thread. Just a disclaimer.

I have no idea how to, and I don't really know how anyone would quantify 'traveling' folk in the US.

When it comes to train-riders, though, I was talking to an older, more experienced friend of mine a few years ago. I asked how many riders he thought were out there at the moment, and he asked whether I meant how many stupid crust lords are stumbling around train yards once in a while, or how many actual train riders there were. I asked for what he'd call an 'real' train rider, and he said pretty simply that he'd put that at someone who rides more than 50 trains a year. He put that number about 500, at an obviously rough estimate. Which sounds like it's probably more accurate than people would think/like to think. There's a lotta folks around claiming to ride fr8 hella hard bro, who barely touch the rails in a given year.

Just Food4Less. Er, Thought.