We propose an alternative mechanism for intracellular cargo transport which
results from motor induced longitudinal fluctuations of cytoskeletal
microtubules (MT). The longitudinal fluctuations combined with transient cargo
binding to the MTs lead to long range transport even for cargos and vesicles
having no molecular motors on them. The proposed transport mechanism, which we
call ``hitchhiking'', provides a consistent explanation for the broadly
observed yet still mysterious phenomenon of bidirectional transport along MTs.
We show that cells exploiting the hitchhiking mechanism can effectively up- and
down-regulate the transport of different vesicles by tuning their binding
kinetics to characteristic MT oscillation frequencies
