Slow . . . Gawkers Ahead

Meet Stan Hartgraves, roadside spectacle.

Distracted by a broken nose and some nasty cuts on his forehead (courtesy of a fistfight with a fellow motorist), the 47-year-old Santa Ana man doesn’t notice he’s become a sort of speed bump. Half a dozen California Highway Patrol cruisers at the curb trigger a procession of brake lights.

But it’s the sight of Stan’s bloody head that brings several cars to a dead stop.

Motorists stare. Workers gawk from nearby offices. Mouths gape. Fingers point. Suddenly, a road that was feeding traffic smoothly off the Santa Ana Freeway is headed toward gridlock.

“Well, you got your rubberneckers,” says CHP Officer Shirley Kelly with a chuckle. “Who needs an accident?”

Twisted metal only makes things worse.

In November, Kelly parked her CHP cruiser on the shoulder of the Santa Ana Freeway across the center divider from a southbound pileup. Minutes later, a Wells Fargo armored truck smashed her cruiser.

“He’s going full bore and then someone in front of him steps on the brakes,” Kelly says. Her car was in his escape route. “He hit the right rear and took the bumper all the way to the back seat. Brand-new sergeant’s car. Two thousand miles on it. It was totaled.

“That,” she says dryly, “was a rubbernecker.”

Call them rubberneckers, gawkers or looky-loos. Whatever the name, they are a maddening fact of life on Southern California roads. When a radio traffic report says there’s a rollover on the northbound San Diego Freeway, it’s a sure bet southbound lanes will also slow to a crawl as heads turn for a peek at freeway carnage.

“I get so mad when I see all those people looking, oh, my God,” fumes Tom Slyman, who became a brief roadside spectacle last month when his van was rear-ended on the Santa Ana Freeway. “It’s so annoying. You’ll be sitting for half an hour and you finally get there and it’s some guy changing his tire.”

When there’s blood on the pavement, it only gets worse.

Freeway regulars like “Commander” Chuck Street, KIIS-FM’s (102.7) traffic helicopter pilot, have given up on railing against the tide of rubberneckers.

“It used to make me angry, but now I just kind of accept it as human nature,” he says. “It’s just such a linear experience. A few people start looking and traffic just backs up.”

The delay increases exponentially. Caltrans officials estimate that roughly 20% of the time motorists spend in a traffic jam caused by a car crash is due to freeway gawkers.

While those extra two minutes in a 10-minute traffic jam may not seem like much to one person, think about what it’s like when 5,000 drivers lose two minutes: 166 hours lost for a momentary look at an upside-down truck.

Adel Malek, a Caltrans traffic team leader in Orange County, estimates motorists there lose a collective 1.6 million hours a year to rubbernecking. That’s 6,400 hours every working day.

“Just go ahead and keep driving,” Malek says. “Don’t look. It’s dangerous.”

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So if rubbernecking is slowing down our fast-paced world, why do we continue to look?

“Curiosity,” explains Cal State Fullerton psychologist Troy Zimmer. “We do it naturally. Anything out of the ordinary, anything strange or new gets our attention. Another thing is that people know they are vulnerable in life--illness, sickness, accidents or whatever--so when they run across situations like this, there is another unconscious psychological need to see something worse has happened to someone else.

“In a funny way, it gives us a little lift,” he says.

It’s not mean-spirited, Zimmer says. He believes that sharing the voyeuristic urge to see someone else’s misfortune is a deep-rooted desire to help.

“These are all really subtle psychological processes that are not really conscious,” he says. “It looks awful. When I see it on the freeway, my first reaction is, ‘You’re awful,’ and I know better.”

Gerald Larue, who teaches psychology at USC, offers a less kind assessment: There is some integral part of human nature that draws us to disaster--on the freeway, the nightly news or even the latest “World’s Scariest” special on the Fox network. He suspects an ancient blood lust lurks deep in the human psyche.

“We have a morbid curiosity in terms of accidents, bodies and crime scenes that has been encouraged by media coverage--particularly television. All of these things feed our desire to be a witness to a spectacle,” Larue says. “It’s similar to the spectacle of the Roman circuses where people were put to death. We haven’t gotten past that.”

A commuter himself, Larue is tired of waiting for humanity to grow up and stop rubbernecking.

“It drives me nuts,” he fumes.

If rubbernecking is a modern blood sport, then authorities are the umps--uniformed whipping boys for the frustrated motoring public.

“They do it all the time,” says the CHP’s Kelly. “When their windows are down, you’ll hear them cussing.”

Minutes later, Kelly is investigating an accident on the San Diego Freeway when a yuppie type in a red Jeep Grand Cherokee lays on his horn and extends his middle finger in her direction--as if she’s personally responsible for the traffic jam.

“I don’t even look anymore,” she shrugs.

Los Angeles County Coroner’s Investigator Erik Arbuthnot admits there is some kind of “energy” surrounding disaster scenes, but that doesn’t excuse some of the vicious behavior he’s seen in only two years on the death beat. The worst: working a grisly crash that killed two children under the intense--sometimes smoldering--stares of rubberneckers.

“I’m standing in the middle of the freeway, the family is crying and I’m trying to make an identification,” he says. “Some guy comes along, obviously pissed off, and he yells--in front of everyone--’I hope they’re dead.’

“I wanted to kick him.”

Chalk up another point for the dark side of human nature.

*

Rubberneckers are not unique to freeways. Yellow crime-scene tape or fire-engine lights suck in gawkers like moths drawn to the lights at Anaheim’s Edison Field. So much for dignity in death. Persistent crowds at crime scenes prompted the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to invest in white “gawk screens”--3-foot barriers that thwart prying eyes and allow detectives to examine a body with some privacy.

L.A. Coroner’s Capt. Dean Gilmour has often dreamed of making bigger, better screens to block off freeway crashes, but they’re impractical. Caltrans tried it.

“It’s one of our pet peeves,” Gilmour says. “You’ve got the general public and TV cameras trying to get a peek. Sometimes we just have officers hold a sheet up. We work with the families of these people, and that’s difficult enough without all these other things.”