Rubbernecking gets its name from the fact that people turn their heads to watch something as they drive. This act of gawking at the exterior distraction can cause traffic to slow down as drivers pay more attention to what they’re looking at than the road around them.
This can also lead to a lot of car accidents. Many people find it very difficult to look away from a crash, perhaps because they’re worried about the same thing happening to them or simply because it is an unexpected and interesting event on an otherwise boring drive. They stare at a car that has gone off of the road, they watch the flashing lights from the police vehicles and they try to see if they can figure out what happened as they go by.
This is a major distraction
You can imagine how big of a distraction this can be for those drivers. A lot of times, rubbernecking drivers will cause secondary accidents or chain-reaction crashes. A driver who is staring at a crashed car on the side of the road doesn’t notice that traffic has slowed down ahead of them, and then they rear-end another car. This just makes the whole situation worse and snarls traffic further, and there are even cases where the secondary accident is far worse than the initial accident that everyone was looking at.
Have you been injured?
This is just one of the types of distraction that causes serious accidents and injuries all the time in the United States. If this happens to you and another negligent driver causes the crash, you need to know how to seek compensation for your medical bills and the other costs stemming from that accident.
