I wasn’t going to blog about my recent, uh, recent personal tragedy until I read an interesting NYT review of Tom Vanderbilt’s ‘Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)’:
An alternate title for the book might be “Idiots.” Vanderbilt, who writes regularly about design and technology, cites a finding that 12.7 percent of the traffic slowdown after a crash has nothing to do with wreckage blocking lanes; it’s caused by gawkers. Rubberneckers attend to the spectacle so avidly that they themselves then get into accidents, slamming into the car in front of them when it brakes to get a better look or dig out a cellphone to take a picture. (This happens often enough for traffic types to have coined a word for it: “digi-necking.”)
Bingo. That scenario was my reality on Wednesday. In the middle of Greensboro’s infamous Death Valley. At rush hour. Traffic had slowed going past an existing incident on the side of the highway, although I’ll give my fellow drivers a bigger benefit of the doubt and hope they were slowing for safety reasons. I had just started to slow when I noticed the brake lights on the car in front of me. Just as I tapped my brakes, I noticed the car behind me approaching right before she slammed into my rear end.
Fortunately no one was hurt. The other driver’s front end was totally smashed, but, to my surprise, my rear bumper was only was only slightly scraped and dented. That’s the ’93 Honda Accord, one of the best cars ever built. Runs like a trooper and built to take shot.
The worst part was standing on the side of the highway as rush hour traffic zoomed by on a rain-slick highway. If they were rubbernecking my situation, they were doing so at a higher rate of speed.
