Salocin

Rubbernecking

Americans have a way with words. By and large, when you hear English spoken in the US (leaving out obvious exceptions like university lectures and politics), the vocabulary used by many native speakers is so limited it's the auditory equivalent bad sushi - it keeps repeating on you. They balance this by being very creative about a small number of extremely unusual and interesting words - like Rubbernecking.

It's a word that manages to work on several levels at once - elegant in it's vulgarity, vicious and scornful while remaining descriptive.

It describes an action: bending one's head to see something as one moves past it. It has an implied meaning: Slowing down all the traffic behind you as your speed drops. It goes so much further than that.

It inspires a visual image of someone with a strange deformity, a person with a rubber neck - a physical reflection of the societal deformity that inspires this disturbing obsession with the misfortune of others. A deformity which will be witnessed a second time as these people reach their destinations and start their first sentence with as graphical (and possibly enhanced) a description of what they witnessed as they can manage, their colleagues or family listening with the same gruesome fascination manifested by the passers-by on the motorway.

Calling people rubberneckers is also derogatory.

I like that. It feels appropriate.

When I finally passed the broken-down car on the other side of the M4 as I made my way to work this morning, the traffic in front of me suddenly cleared and I went from an almost stationary position in traffic to an empty motorway.

All because people needed to see. Which is ironic, since all there was to see was a stationary car with it's hazard lights flashing and thousands upon thousands of cars stuck behind it, trying to get into London.

Goes to show the damage one single automotive malfunction can cause : for every 1000 cars, 45 minutes lost, which is 750 hours (94 working days) per 1000 cars. Not to mention the added fuel cost, pollution and general irritation caused. And there were many multiples of 1000 cars stuck in traffic behind that breakdown - entire years of work lost in a single morning.

Given the cost of that, you'd think they'd make better cars, or work out a way to prevent a single breakdown from causing such damage. But for that to work, someone would have to bear the cost of the disruption - instead, the cost is spread over many individuals, many companies, and an environment for which nobody is responsible. Diluted in this way, the cost to each company is sufficiently low that it's not worth their while to take the necessary measures to prevent such things from happening, other than the government-mandated automotive MOT test, which clearly didn't help this morning.

Every day, some disruption or other costs travellers on the M4 at least 15 minutes, regardless of which direction you're driving in. People adapt, they suck up the cost individually, they leave 15 minutes earlier, arrive home 30 minutes later. After all - nobody has to pay for family time, it's free, so if such disruptions are going to cut into something, personal time is the soft target. If it cut into work, there would be consequences, and these would be borne by individuals, not by the cause of the delay.

Regardless of the lip service paid to family values and work/life balance, when push comes to shove, it's unreasonable to assume that a deterioration in (for example) traffic conditions is going to get compensated for by employers - it's the family time it cuts into. While that's perfectly understandable given the way things are set up, where does it lead?

If we're stuck on the motorway, and we're not going to see our friends and family any time soon anyway, and we've been made to wait for the last 30 minutes in traffic, we might as well take a good look at the moron who wasn't paying attention, or the car that broke down and prevented thousands of people from getting home. Why should we try so hard to avoid rubbernecking when in reality, whether we take a good look or not isn't going to make the slightest bit of difference? I can change my own behaviour, but the group dynamic isn't changing any time soon, and my trying to do the right thing is a single drop of water in the desert - an effort with no result. Why bother?

This morning, the broken down car was a BMW (German engineering eh?), it was stationary in the fast lane (I don't think BMW drivers know about the other lanes) and the driver was a 30-ish guy who didn't look the slightest bit disturbed that his breakdown was holding up a queue of traffic several miles long, as the cars squeezed past in the one remaining lane.

I didn't realise that was what was holding up traffic until I was actually driving past it, since it was on the other carriageway, so I didn't get a chance to slow down for a better look, but since everyone else did, I feel left out of the societal movement. I didn't get to add my 2 seconds of additional delay to the thousands of cars behind me. I'm sure I'll get my chance on the way home tonight.

Posted by nlvp at February 2, 2006 09:00 AM