So you’re striding purposefully along a crowded downtown sidewalk when, up ahead, a guy in a suit slips on a slick hamburger wrapper and falls with a thud to the concrete.
What do you do?
You slow down. You look. Maybe you reach out to help. Maybe your attention is drawn to the rip in one knee of his pants. Maybe you study his face to see if he’s in any pain. And then you go on your way.
It’s a human reaction. You can’t not look.
It’s the same when you’re driving — and not the same.
Say you’re tooling down the Dan Ryan or the Kennedy or the Tri-State, and, suddenly, up ahead, around the next bend, something’s on fire. Clouds of thick, black smoke billow into the sky. Within seconds, you’ll be upon it — whatever it is.
What do you do?
You slow down. You look. The fire turns out to be in a car on the shoulder, and you look to make sure that you’re in no danger. You look to see if there’s anyone near or — heaven forbid — in the burning car in need of help. And maybe you notice that the car is a new one and must have cost its owner a pretty penny and now it’s going up in smoke. And then you’re past that spot and on your way again, back at full speed.
It’s just like what happened on the sidewalk but for this: When you slow down your car to look at the fire, all of the cars and trucks and vans behind you have to slow down too.
The result, in anything but the lightest of traffic, is a gapers block — a traffic jam in which cars and trucks, backed up for miles, creep along while their drivers fume.
Actually, “gapers block” is a Chicago-area term that’s all but unknown outside the metropolitan region. Throughout most of the U.S., the phenomenon is called “rubbernecking.” And, on the West Coast, where driving is something approximating religion, those who slow traffic to gawk at things along the roadside are ridiculed as “looky-loos.”
Traffic professionals tend to shrug their shoulders and accept gapers blocks as a fact of life.
“Rubbernecking is human behavior,” says Gerald Donaldson, senior research director with the Washington, D.C.-based Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “People will rubberneck. No force on Earth will stop them.”
But, on the face of it, gapers blocks seem so unnecessary. Who hasn’t gotten progressively angrier while sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for what seems like hours only to find that the tie-up was caused by drivers slowing to watch a cop give a ticket or to check out the image of an oddly coiffed basketball player painted on the side of a building or to marvel at a huge balloon of a pink gorilla in a yellow bathing suit at a car dealer near the highway?
Emotions do run high. Witness the editorial that the Edmund Publications Corp., a Beverly Hills, Calif.-based publisher of auto and truck buying guides, posted on its Web site under the headline: “Kill the Looky-Loos.”
It was, of course, tongue-in-cheek. But the anger was real.
Calling looky-loos “mindless mutants,” Karl Brauer, the editorial’s author, groaned: “They have an insatiable fascination with flashing lights and twisted metal, regardless of how many thousands of innocents are trapped behind them with full bladders and empty gas tanks. . . . They can turn a simple fender-bender into a wasted afternoon.”
The problem is that when a driver slows down — even a little — it forces other drivers to react. The cars and trucks immediately behind have to ease up on the accelerator to avoid a collision. Some will try to shift to another lane. And then, in addition to whatever the original distraction was, the slowing car itself becomes something for other drivers to look at: Why is that guy slowing down? What am I missing?
This results in a chain reaction in which the first car or group of cars to slow down forces those behind it to reduce speed that, in turn, makes the next batch of drivers put on the brakes, and so on. Leon James, a Hawaiian psychologist who has extensively studied driver behavior, notes that, if you were in a helicopter, you could see this happening as if it were a ripple running back through the traffic. “Traffic waves go behind you from where you do the rubbernecking,” he says.
That gives a hint at why motorists get so frustrated with gapers blocks.
The initial drivers cut back their speed maybe 5 or 10 miles an hour, get a good look at whatever there is to see and are gone. They aren’t inconvenienced at all. But, in satisfying their curiosity, they end up inconveniencing everyone behind them.
Those unfortunate drivers lose time to the gapers block, certainly — but, even more significant, they lose control.
Driving — at least in the U.S. — is about control. Why do you think there are so many one-person cars in rush hour? Hardly anyone wants to give up control.
Nothing gives the illusion of being in control of your life as flying down the highway at high speed, unimpeded and unrestrained. And nothing shatters that illusion as completely as a traffic jam, particularly a traffic jam caused not by roadwork or an accident that blocks a lane, but by other drivers who, at their own whim, are moving slowly.
Of course, those who grouse about gapers while stuck back in traffic often become gapers themselves when, finally, they get to the front of the line.
“Let’s say you’re a mile or two miles upstream,” says Roy Fonda, the operations engineer for the Chicago-area office of the Illinois Department of Transportation. “Now you’ve crawled at a reduced speed up to the point of the incident. Things are opening up, but you’re still going to go slow. You’re going to think: What the hell, why not take a second or two and see what caused it? I might as well see what’s there.”
Sometimes, there’s nothing to see. Nothing. Whatever it was that originally slowed traffic is gone.
And, sometimes, it’s the most mundane of things. Once, on the Kennedy, bags of cement fell off a truck. The debris was quickly cleared away, but the gapers block continued much longer. What happened was that the powder discolored the pavement, and motorists were slowing down to gaze at it.
“Anything can slow traffic down,” says Master Sgt. Lincoln Hampton of the Illinois State Police. “If it’s something that’s a little different, say an antique car on the shoulder, it’s: Oh, look at the car!”
An element of this is the boredom that afflicts motorists who commute along the same highways day-in and day-out. Those highways are designed to keep your eyes on the road. The shoulders all look the same, as do all the entry and exit ramps — everything’s arranged to eliminate distractions. So when a vintage Model T or a hitchhiker or just somebody changing a tire is suddenly there on the side of the road, you have a hard time not looking — and not slowing down to look.
While such distractions are diverting for drivers, a much deeper and more complex set of feelings are evoked when motorists happen on the twisted, shattered, smashed-up remains of an accident, particularly one with injuries.
You feel compelled to look, even as you dread what you may see.
“For one thing, there is relief: Gee, it’s not me or one of my loved ones,” says Arnold Nerenberg, a Whittier, Calif., psychologist who specializes in driver behavior. “The other issue is a kind of fascination with seeing injured and dead people.”
Humans always have been attracted and repelled by blood, violence, chaos and danger. Consider the town holiday atmosphere that surrounded public executions in Europe as recently as a couple of hundred years ago. Or consider the gore and mayhem of today’s horror movies.
In this context, the real-life carnage of a traffic accident, Nerenberg says, reminds you of your own mortality, and that’s something humans seem to need — perhaps because it makes life appear more precious. “There are a lot of things we know about cognitively, intellectually, that we don’t feel emotionally,” says Nerenberg. “For many people, death and injury are not real. If we see it can happen to someone else, we think it can happen to us.”
For W.J.T. Mitchell, a cultural historian at the University of Chicago, rubbernecking at a traffic accident is like the childhood game of peek-a-boo.
“When you play the game, you appear and disappear,” Mitchell says, “and there’s the pretense of being scared. That’s what the boo is all about. People have to learn how to see the world. And one of the things we train ourselves to do is how to deal with visual shock.”
So part of the need that drivers feel to gawk at a crash — and cause a gapers block — is to prepare themselves for all the shocks that will come in the future when they’re not so prepared and protected.
And there’s one other thing: Drivers rubberneck at accidents — whether on the sidewalk or the highway — because of the pleasure that humans get when they get close to something harmful or tragic without actually coming to harm themselves.
“It’s like looking into the abyss,” Mitchell says. “Why do people get up on tall mountains or on high buildings, and look over the edge? It’s the sense of danger, but with the feeling of safety. The attractiveness of seeing an accident is the attraction of chaos, disorder. You want to look, and you don’t want to look. You’re trying to see and not see at the same time.
“You want to get close — but not too close.”
This is something that’s hard-wired into the human psyche, and it’s been that way for thousands of years. Of course, through most of those eons, the urge to look-and-not-look has been simply a personal experience. It’s only in the motorized modern world that the compulsion to gawk has had broad social ramifications — namely, the gapers block.
