One lane out of four is blocked with a couple of cars that have been in a minor fender bender. Traffic is backed up for MILES, because every mouth-breathing, glue-huffing fuckstick in the other three lanes has to slow down to 3/4 mph to gawk stupidly.
Therefore, what usually takes me 15 minutes to drive took me 45 minutes, and I missed my goddamn meeting.
:mad:
I also liked Tom Wolfe’s term for them: Freelance gawkers.
It’s even worse when the problem is on the other side of the divider - having to go thru all of that and find out the only reason those morons had to slow down was their juvenile curiosity.
Sure, but they didn’t know it was a minor fender-bender until they got a chance to see for themselves, right? I mean, there could have been somebody with their head on fire or something - inquiring minds want to know before they speed up!
Oh, we call it “gaper’s block.” And how many close calls do you see due to this? I always see a few people trying to go around it all and almost smashing into another car for another fender bender.
No shit, once I saw two men on Ventura Boulevard at rush hour who both pulled over to yell at each other. They were not entirely off to the shoulder. One was out of his car, the other one still in his car. While me and many others are watching and laughing at these two guys, another car smashes into one of them! Minor damage, and I got clearance just after that, but I hope the two chest beaters shut up after that. What a day in court that must’ve been. :rolleyes:
Annoying, but it’s really not anyone deliberately slowing to stare, y’know. It’s a standing wave in the traffic, entirely naturally caused by the removal of 1/4 of the road’s capacity at one point. Merging causes no end of problems if people don’t leave gaps for others, and, well … people don’t.
I always like this video, of cars on a circular track. All the drivers were told to maintain an equal distance to the one in front, but spontaneous waves form almost instantly as the track is near capacity. None of them are slowing deliberately; it’s an almost inescapable effect.
Some guy made a whole website about this. 
Be honest: you just stood in a traffic jam for 45 minutes, and you’re not going to look to see what caused it? You’re not slowing down to look, you’re just coasting for 3 seconds until you hit the gas.
Those 3 seconds are exactly how traffic jams are formed.
Or someone having a pre-AFTERBUCKET Experience.
And furthermore, if you don’t slow down, you’ll run into the Pauli Exclusion Principle which will prevent the electrons of your vehicle from occupying the same state as the electrons in the vehicle in front of you thus causing a freakin crash.
True, but I was talking about the moment you finally get to the site of the accident and the road miraculously opens up before you. If people accelerated the moment they reach that point, there’d be no jam; but they don’t - they keep on crawling for a few more seconds so they can see what kept them waiting.
I miss a lot of things not working in an outside office - but the drive to work isn’t one of them!
This is it precisely, but it’s always more fun to blame people rather than physics.
Riddle me this then. Why does traffic slow down to a crawl when:[ul]
[li]The accident is on the other side of a divided hiway[/li][li]Someone is changing a tire on the shoulder[/li][li]A cop is giving someone a ticket on the shoulder[/li][li]A building off the highway is on fire.[/li][/ul]
Clearly, you’ve never driven in the US. People will slow to a crawl to observe an accident that’s a hundred yards off the roadway, and we have fairly wide shoulders on all major roads, so there’s always somewhere to move the vehicles unless they’re on a ramp. It is people deliberately slowing to stare here.
Because these things are genuinely distracting, and even without people consciously slowing down to see what’s going on, they can cause enough perturbations in the system that a standing wave forms. As the video I linked shows, standing waves can be caused by nothing, in a pool of drivers with specific instructions to maintain station. So why assume only idiots cause standing waves in your examples? You might slow to make sure the tire-changer doesn’t step out into the lane, you might change lane to give him more room; all sorts of things can spark a standing wave. In near-capacity flows, tiny perturbations become amplified, to the point where it’s silly to blame fellow drivers, who are just as much at the mercy of the system as you.
I’m not saying rubberneckers don’t exist, but the OP seems to think it’s a conscious decision by all his fellow drivers to slow down, whereas the likelihood is that every person in the jam is equally bemused. If he suffered a 30 minute delay, he can’t even have been in sight of the accident when he first slowed. So why assume everyone else is being annoying? It’s just the mechanics of complex systems at work.
Again, I did not say rubber-neckers don’t exist. Merely that it can take just one (or none) to cause a tailback, and once one forms, everyone in it is equally at its mercy. It’s the joys of a flow system that varies between compressible and incompressible.
Rather than ragging on fellow drivers, people should leave gaps in front of their cars (yes, even if it means the occasional knobhead ducks in front of you). It helps merging, it helps dissipate standing waves, and it means on average, everyone gets there faster.
All it takes to create a slowdown wave is one guy tapping his brakes, as long as the car behind him is close enough. The chain reaction behind them will soon spread to the other lanes and before you know it, a bunch of people are late for work.
Oh, okay. Carry on then.
I would like to emphasize this. Nobody slows down “to a crawl” on purpose. It is just the cumulative effect of everybody tapping their brakes for half a second. It’s a natural reaction, and to the OP: you probably did it too when you passed the incident.
One of my favourite websites of all time, for various reasons. It should be mandatory reading before anyone gets a driver’s license.