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The '''Ruhr Area''' (German: ''Ruhrgebiet''), also called simply the Ruhr, is an urban area in [[North Rhine-Westphalia]], [[Germany]], consisting of a number of large formerly industrial cities, including [[Duisburg]], [[Oberhausen]], [[Bottrop]], [[Mülheim an der Ruhr]], [[Essen]], [[Gelsenkirchen]], [[Bochum]], [[Herne]], [[Hamm]], [[Hagen]], [[Dortmund]], [[Recklinghausen]], [[Unna]] and [[Witten]]. It has about five million inhabitants and is thus significally bigger than Berlin, Hamburg or Munich.
Altough, there is a very high density of motorways, hitchhiking there is quite tricky because of the maze of minor motorways. Major motorways in this area are the [[A1 (Germany)|A1]], [[A2 (Germany)|A2]] and [[A3 (Germany)|A3]]. If you hitch here make sure you stay on this major motorways, on the smaller ones it will be really hard to find transit traffic. [['''Germany is a nice place for hitching, but the Ruhr Area is by far the most unpleasant part of the country from this point of view]]. ''' Hitching in the Ruhr Area can be compared with hitching inside a big city like Istanbul and the cities are independent, but for the traveller they will all seem like districts of one big city.
On the one hand, there is a lot of local traffic and even though there will be a lot of cars and usually many traffic jams, the most cars won't go in your direction.
