Interesting hypothesis. I would have liked to ask the knuckle-dragger directly in front of me who 1) had no one in front of him, and 2) slowed down to a near stop to take in the spectacle, his take on the matter. Repeatedly. With a blunt object.
And no, of course I didn’t slow down to look when I passed. I sped up, because I had shit to do.
If you didn’t look, how do you know it was a minor fender-bender?
Saw it from the back, while I waited for Captain Imbecile to finish his inspection from the parallel position.
Anything else?
I don’t care if people produce a thousand academic studies proving that no rubbernecker has caused ever caused a traffic jam, anywhere. When I reach the end of the gaper’s block, and there is one car between me and the open road, and that car is doing five miles per hour while the driver gawks at some toothless troglodyte whose beater has broken down on the shoulder, I am pissed at that person and will wish tortures and damnation upon them until the end of time. I hate them with the fire of a thousand carbeques, and nothing anybody can say will make me feel otherwise.
I try to not let other folks live rent-free in my head. But whatever suits you, Freddy. 
Of course you’re going to slow down-if you have half a brain. Charging through an accident site at full speed is rather reckless-even if they are off of all lanes, you should as a matter of safety give them a brake and/or room, else you could cause a second accident. Heck in some states if a cop is on the side you must, by law, merge away from him if possible and prudent.
Perhaps one problem is indeed those who fail to give it gas when the coast is clear-that much is certainly possible. But I’d say the vast majority of drivers out there are not to “blame” for such slowdowns, and even if there is a jam, that’s better than the demolition derby which might result if nobody slowed down at all.
If it really is just one person slowing down, then fine; the man is an idiot. However, I don’t see how a half-hour delay can be caused by one person, unless he started slowing down somewhere near Denver. Face it: merging a major highway from four lanes into three is going to cause some problems, even if everyone has the very best of intentions.
Freddy, there’s always someone right at the front of a standing wave; indeed, at some point everyone gets to the front. And he can only start moving just after the person in front of him moves. That delay is what causes standing waves. You’re doing the exact same thing to the person right behind you, who in turn is doing it to the person behind him, and so forth. None of you is doing it deliberately. I repeat: if you want to stop being annoyed at your fellow man, leave a gap between you and the next car. This will allow you to accelerate away smoothly, and will help dissipate the wave faster. You will be better off; everyone else will be better off.
Alternatively, you could keep getting pissy at people for no good reason. Damn the facts, if your blood pressure is too low…
No! No, that’s the key point here–I’m not!
The car two cars in front of me accelerates away. The car in front of me is now at the head of the queue. Does he accelerate? No. Does he pause just a moment for the first car to get a safe distance ahead? No. He takes a good loooooong look at the exciting tire change being executed on the shoulder, as if critiquing Indy pit work. Sometimes he even pauses to count the teeth on the cave man whose beater occasioned the excitement. Then and only then, after many seconds have elapsed, does he turn his neck forward and accelerate away.
I follow at once, as soon as it is safe to do so. See the difference?
But you never know when you might see a body covered in a blanket in the middle of the interstate! That means someone died…and is priceless watercooler fodder!
Stay vigilant!
Fine, but I think you’re deluding yourself. Your “as soon as it is safe to do so” is most likely his “good looooooong look”. I’m sure you’re convinced that your reactions are nonpareil, and that it would take a veritable Schumacher to start with as much alacrity, but (and no offence) I just don’t think you’re that special. None of us are.
I hear so frequently that everyone else is a rubbernecking bastard, from people who are quite plainly the only sensible driver on the road, that I just can’t square these accounts with reality. Given the incontrovertible evidence that standing waves are an intrinsic property of traffic, it’s far more likely that pretty much everyone is trying to get where they’re going asap, and in so doing are contributing to an emergent property that pisses everyone off. I realise this is frustrating in that it gives us no-one to blame, but it is nonetheless the case. It’s demonstrable, observable; all sorts of-ables.
Really; watch the youtube video I linked to earlier. Who’s the rubbernecker there? Why on earth do all those drivers end up starting and stopping? Is there an identifiable bastard in their midst? Of course not. So stop whinging, and leave a gap. If you do so, you’ll even be able to cope with a genuine rubbernecker, as you’ll have made the flow briefly compressible, and will have prevented him bringing the flow to a complete stop. You’ll be a hero! The best pig on the road!
Gee, some users of the Pit will make excuses for any bad/annoying/harmful human behavior. I thought the point was to rant and not to say “now now we shouldn’t blame the poor helpless creatures for {fill in the blank}.” 
I can’t stand rubberneckers! :mad:
A commute is quite a few minutes out of your life. The least you can expect for payment is the ocasional, “There, but for the intelligence God gave earthworms, go I,” moments. The so-called Hillside Strangler unsuccessfully, even after changes, channels three major highways into just a few lanes of traffic. Stuck in the right lane, as someone who drives like a grandma often finds himself, I saw an angry driver get hit though he had no right-of-way in the lane he forced himself into. This allowed me to duck in front of him and into his lane, after a quick, “Thanks, asshole!” All other cases left me waiting while other drivers got to shout out their, “Thanks, assholes,” but the Traffic Godz gave me my one chance for payment.
Okay, decades later I was just about the last person past a tractor trailer with a burning tire that was starting to burn the trailer (the driver had unhitched it and gone elsewhere, probably for help) before the entire tollway got shut for hours.
The lesson is, if you can, yell your insults as you hit the gas.
I am.
I have saved many a meeting by just letting my distance to the car in front decrease when I notice a slow down and then letting it increase again, while maintaining a more constant speed. Yep, I’m awesome like that.
Gawkers make things worse because an unexpected slow down can be amplified many times in packed traffic. But going 4 to 3 lanes on a busy highway a jam is obviously likely anyway, with or without gawkers.
See, everybody? Pedro is special. Gold star for Pedro.
Ah, but the overriding purpose of the SDMB is to be right in as annoying a manner as possible, preferably with cites. (cite)
Yes, traffic jams can occur without any rubbernecking. When you put too much traffic in too few lanes, it won’t slow down evenly; it will devolve into the phenomenom described on the traffic reports as “stop and go traffic”. You go 30 mph; you stop for a while. You go 30 mph; you stop again. Nobody is responsible. I understand that.
But that isn’t what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about traffic jams with a specific proximate cause–namely, some sort of commotion on the shoulder of the road, or on the other side of the highway. Traffic was flowing smoothly, and would continue to do so were it not for the commotion. But instead, it grinds to a lengthy stop.
To gauge the impact of rubbernecking, we need a simulation where drivers slow down to gape for varying length of time, and we watch the impact. I’ve never seen such a simulation. It doesn’t do any good to say, “Jams occur without rubbernecking”, any more than saying “People lose money in the stock market all the time” would excuse Bernie Madoff.
Actually, the OP is about a situation in which four lanes merged into three, so off-road incidents are irrelevant, but never mind; it’s already been explained why even off-road incidents can cause entirely well-meaning drivers to slow down for sensible reasons. Believe what you want, though.
Exactly right. People seem to get hung up on the notion that traffic jams can occur even when rubbernecking is not to blame. That’s certainly true, but it’s naive to think that rubbernecking doesn’t play a huge part in this game.
Freddy has mentioned before, but I think this is clearly evidenced by the fact that the driver at the front of the traffic jam almost never starts accelerating until the person is already past the accident site. At least, that’s what I’ve observed. Do they start accelerating as soon as the driver in front of them has taken off, just as people do in normal traffic? No. There is almost invariably a large delay between the two events, so you can’t blame that on the normal traffic dynamics.
Here’s another example. I was about to start a Pit thread about my fellow motorists at an accident that I observed yesterday. We saw a 4x4 ram straight into a small car, smashing it and turning it upside down. I was trying to get to this vehicle, to see if the driver needed help, but I couldn’t. Why? Because the drivers in front of me were too busy gawking, even after the traffic light had turned green.
You can’t blame this on any standing wave effects, folks. The lead car didn’t slow down due to stop-and-go traffic. Rather, he just sat there, even though the light had turned green. Even after I started blaring my horn (this was a potential medical emergency, after all!), he just kept inching forward, and so did the guy in the neighboring lane. Me? I pulled into a nearby parking lot as quickly as I could, then dashed to the victim’s side. (Thankfully, a helpful pedestrian managed to reach her before I could.)
I’ll say it again: You can’t blame this on any standing wave effects. Nor can you blame this on obstructed traffic lanes, since these vehicles were not blocking our flow of traffic. This happened because people felt like rubbernecking – and mind you, this was a potential crisis situation where immediate medical attention could have been required.
Therein lies the problem. Competent drivers avoid letting themselves get distracted – especially under heavy traffic conditions. That’s why traffic officials say that drivers should offer nothing more than a quick glance without slowing down.
It’s not enough to say that people don’t consciously slow down in order to take in the sights. Rather, people need to consciously avoid slowing down, especially if they understand that’s how accidents and traffic jams get started.
“rubbernecking” does indeed cause the slowdowns (and dead stops) you’re talking about – but, as others have tried to point out, it doesn’t mean that everyone, or even the majority of the people being held up are rubberneckers. All it takes is one idiot at the start of the line. Since nobody can go through hiim without causing a new accident, the next guy is held up, and so on down the line. And the tie-up won’t stop when that one jerk takes off – it takes time for these things to clear up, even with the best of drivers in all the other cars.
And then, of course, all you need is one more jerk in the queue while the traffic is starting to unfurl to cause the cycle to start all over again. And it will take a while to undo that tie-up. And so on. In fact, the fact that the tie-up gets so long makes later drivers want to know what was causing it.
Moral: It takes one rubbernecker to start a traffic slow-down. And it only takes a handful of others in reaction to maintain it. Don’t condemn the whole roadfull of suffering commuters because of these few.
