OK, it turned out to be a bad accident and rumor has it that this resulted in a fatality. But when it’s on the other side of the road, which was separated by those substantial concrete dividers, there was no physical debris in our direction to impede us. Do you really have to STOP and look? Have you not sat in this traffic long enough? Do you have nowhere else to go?
Sometimes, after sitting for an eternity so everyone can gawk, I want to make sure that there IS a fatality by personally causing one.
Ugh, yes. This has happened to me a time or two. Heck, I’ve seen enough car bombs that a mangled pile of scrap metal is not at all exciting to me. It brings back memories of having to load the debris into a dump truck with a track loader, or by hand into said loader. I’ve seen enough broken bones with limbs pointed the wrong way, and bloody skulls on the rugby pitch, that I’ve pretty much gotten my fill. In reality, the main thing that stops me from gawking at an accident is the time I saw a cop fly by in the opposite direction. We turned around at the end of the main street, and on the way back saw a guy hanging out the back of a car the cop had just hit. It was the captain of my college rugby team. Dead.
I’m more worried about the teen-aged girl in the car in front of me.
THREE TIMES in the last ten years, I’ve driven past an accident behind a teen-aged girl, only to have her suddenly freak out and slam on the brakes right next to the accident, nearly causing another accident as I and others have to jam on our brakes and/or swerve violently to avoid the collision.
The last time was at night, just around a curve on a highway where we were all doing nearly 60mph. We were damned lucky there was no one in the center lane, because that’s where I and the car behind me ended up, with the third car coming perilously close to smacking her from behind. Damn, but that kid should have been pulled from her car and beaten with heavy sticks for that kind of stupidity.
I’ve never seen anyone else do something so monstrously stupid. Just teen aged girls, usually with friends in their cars.
I believed this all my life (because my parents, grandparents before them, and everyone else I ever met said it, of course), but about two years ago I did some reading on fluid dynamics and traffic and I am convinced that rubbernecking does not cause traffic jams and does very little or nothing to prolong them.
Come to DFW. I was delayed about 20 minutes on a 15-minute trip. I understand people slowing down when they see the flashing lights because you can’t always tell if there will be debris in your lane and so on…it’s the COMPLETE STOPPING part when it’s obvious that your lanes are unaffected that gets me.
Drivers in Texas do something I haven’t seen much elsewhere: they drive off the road. That is, when a traffic jam occurs, as if we’re all in four-wheel drive vehicles, they drive off the shoulder and across the grass to the access roads. Probably illegal but I haven’t seen anybody cited.
Anyway once we got past the accident, traffic resumed at normal speeds of course. If the accident didn’t cause this, what did?
Update: there was indeed a fatality, news sources confirm. About 1.5 hours later, as I was trying to drive home, I discovered that they had closed down the eastbound lanes completely.
I’m with Chimera: one of these days some idiot in front of me is going to lock the brakes and I’ll be in that vehicle’s backseat. Is this not covered as basic safety in Driver’s Ed.?
This sort of thing annoys me – you don’t need an actual accident; just having a police car with blinking lights on on the other side of the highway is enough to slow ttraffic down significantly on my side.
BUT…
1.) If just ONE car slows down or stops, then ALL THE CARS AFTER HIM HAVE TO, AS WELL. Otherwise, they’d plow into him. In other words, you only need one jerk to create a traffic jam. You can’t say the kjam is caused by “everybody rubbernecking”. After that, things are going to be slow until flow reasserts itself. And you only need one more jerk to slow it again.
2.) If there are police stopped on YOUR side of the road, slowing down doesn’t necessarily make you a jerk. There are people walking by the side of the road (and people who mifght suddenly pop out into traffic) that you don’t want to hit.
It annoys me a lot when I hear on the radio that there’s been an accident on the southbound carriageway, but the northbound one has tailbacks because of rubbernecking - and I’m sat in that northbound queue.
I’m not slowing down to look at the accident, I’m slowing down because the fucking car in front of me is slowing down - if I tried to carry on driving, I would hit the car in front. he’s slowed down because of the car in front of him, and so on. We’re not rubbernecking, we’re just trying to get through a slow queue.
Now, granted, the original hold-up might have been because someone slowed down to take a look (or it might not - it might just be that they saw the accident happen, were startled by it and hit the brakes, or they saw police lights flashing up ahead and eased off the gas as a precaution).
In any case, what now exists is a more or less stationary block of traffic - cars join it at the back, crawl through it, then leave it just after the car in front of them escapes from it - we’re not rubbernecking, we’ve slowed down because we’ve got no bloody choice!
And then what happens when you finally emerge at the front of the queue?
The intelligent driver (rare) thinks, “Finally, the jam is over! I can step on the gas and get the fuck out of here!”
The brain-dead driver (much more common) thinks, “Well, after sitting in that jam for all that time, the least I can do is take a goooooood loooooooong look at whatever caused it. Ooooh, look at that–some hillbilly is sitting on the shoulder with a stalled beater! Gosh, that’s the most fascinating thing I’ve seen since Aunt Myrtle wore a hat with a hen on it to the state fair!”
I love to blast my horn at the brain-dead when I’m second in line.
Freddy, you must frequent a different variety of traffic jams than I do. Most of the drivers I’m stuck behind want nothing more than to get out of there.
Although I do approve of your solution. Effective and cathartic.
They should put up screens around the accident to prevent gawking. It works at the races on the rare occasion they need to put down a horse.
And surely you are kidding Cisco. It is fluid dynamics that explains why we do end up with a false traffic jam and also why, when you get to the point that normal flow resumes, there is nothing to see.
In some jurisdictions you are required to slow down or change to a non-adjacent lane when passing emergency vehicles. Not jam on the brakes for something on the other side of the median, however!
Theory, in your case, does not relate to practice.
This on the other hand is stone-cold fact:
Around here, if two people bump fenders on the inbound Dan Ryan on a sunny Wednesday morning at 7:05 am, you will be late for work, even if you don’t take the Dan Ryan.
I suppose there’s a third case, which is to look over, wondering what the heck it was that held us all up for so long - that’s a bit more understandable, but usually, I’m in the first category - if I’ve been stuck in a long queue, I’m wanting to depart as sharply as possible.
I’m in the camp with those who think that blaming “rubbernecking” is fallacious.
Thought experiment: let’s say you’re in a jam heading northbound because of an accident on the southbound side. You believe your jam is caused by rubberneckers. Now, magically the cause of the rubbernecking suddenly vanishes in an instant. Do you believe the jam you’re in starts flowing again?
No, it would take a while for the traffic to smooth out.
In my opinion, there is a small percentage of people who slooooow down to look - even if the crash is on the other side of the divider. I’ve been stuck in many traffic jams, but a few times in my life I have seen it happen: An accident on the other side of the highway; smooth traffic on my side moving at 50 or 60 mph; and some jerk a car or two in front of me slows down to like 10 mph to rubberneck.
I’m not a traffic engineer, but I would think that if 3-5 percent of cars suddenly slow down like that, it would be sufficient to cause a traffic jam.