Honk if You Know Why You're Honking

Honk if You Know Why You're Honking
The car horn is beeping useless.
By Dave Johns
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET

My mom is not much of a honker. You know what I mean when I say that:
If a driver in front of her fails to hit the gas when the light turns,
she simply waits. Time passes, and the green light glows. Eventually,
the driver notices the signal change, or the cars behind begin to lay
on their horns. Traffic proceeds. But no thanks to my mom; she's just
not much of a honker.

For years I've been telling my mom that she ought to learn to honk a
little more. After all, honking is a venerable automo! tive tradition.
Just over a century ago, Henry Ford's first Model T ro lled off the
production line. Inside, near the driver's side window, was a
grapefruit-sized squeeze bulb affixed to a twice-looped brass trumpet.
It was a horn—one of only a few basic amenities that came standard.
Thus, the car that "put the world on wheels" also gave the world a way
to complain about it: a horn for the great honking masses.

And honk we have. No one keeps official tallies, but with nearly 1
billion cars on the roads, there is no doubt that worldwide honking is
on the rise. In dense cities in places like India and China, where
hordes of new drivers are now navigating ancient tenement districts,
horn-honk! ing is so constant that it is a major noise problem. In
July, traffic police in Mumbai launched a "No Honking Movement" led by
taxi drivers who took an oath not to toot. Last year, Shanghai banned
honking downtown, with the prohibition set to expand to the entire
city. Dhaka is a riot of honking. Cairo is the unofficial honking
capital of the world. Islamabad, Ho Chi Minh City, Lima, Katmandu,
Accra, and New York have issues. Even the virtual world is getting
into the act.

In theory, the horn is a safety device; it might rightly be called the
world's first "collision-avoidance system." But exactly how many
collisions it serves to avoid has never been clear. From its earliest
days, some observers wondered whether the horn wasn't actually
facilitating certain road mishaps by shifting the burden of evasion
from the honker to the honkee. A Londoner argued this case in a 1912
letter to the Times: "Dr! ivers have escaped punishment because they
hooted loudly just before killing an aged and deaf colonel, or an
elderly woman, deaf, and blind of one eye, or capsizing another car
and injuring three or four persons … Ordinary care and precaution
would have prevented each of such accidents. Hooting, however, is
counted a sufficient set-off against the lack of such care and
precaution."

By the 1930s, this judgment was gaining converts. First Paris and then
London outlawed horn-honking at night. In 1935, New York Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia kicked off a nighttime honking ban with a radio
address in which he praised the English anti-horn effort: "The results
have been so good that there is no demand from any quarter for their
return. Automobile accidents, fatalities, and injuries have been
reduced to an appreciable extent merely because the campaign against
horns there has caused drivers to drive more carefully." He said
deaths were down 17 percent and injuries 7 percent sin! ce the ban had
taken effect. A New York Times article from the same year documented
new horn restrictions in Rome, Stockholm, Vienna, and Berlin, under
the headline, "Honking Autoist a World Problem; Every Nation Seeks to
Curb Him; Horns Viewed as Contributing Cause of Accidents Rather Than
Aid to Safety—Campaign On Here to Curb Drivers Who Depend on Blasts
Instead of Brakes."

This assessment of the horn—that it is not in fact an instrument of
safety but something else entirely—has not been refuted. Most honking
research has examined the relationship between horn use and
aggression. People honk more when it's hot than when it's cold, more
on weekdays than on weekends, more if they are male than if they are
female, more at beaters ! than at Benzes, more if they feel they can
do so anonymously (PDF), and more in the city than in the country. My
mother is a classic nonhonker: She is female, suburban, patient, and
climate-control-oriented. Still, it would be nice to know whether her
anti-honk bias poses a risk to society. A spokesman for the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Jose Ucles, could not point to
any studies on safety and the car horn. "It's sort of like brakes," he
said. "Everyone's just always thought it was a good idea."

Jeff Muttart, a traffic-accident reconstructionist, has pored over
hundreds of surveillance videos of real-life car crashes and near-
crashes. In 2005, he concluded that emergency horn use is not
associated with decreased accident involvement. H! e found that
drivers never steered and honked at the same time, and us ually they
didn't honk at all. About half of emergency honks were meant to
chastise and came only after the danger was over. The other half were
just preludes to a crash. "It really didn't serve any purpose at all.
It was just, Hey, by the way, I'm going to hit you."

Also: We stink at honking. A 2001 survey for the U.K. Institute of
Traffic Accident Investigators shows that most people take two to
three times as long to honk as they do to brake or steer. Professional
drivers, like cabbies, are a bit quicker—they practice. (Now that
automakers are getting over the whole tiny-horn-buttons craze, honk
times may improve.)

Muttart explains this honking deficiency by the fact that many people
view the horn as a tool for scolding rather than safety. So when we
want to avoid a crash, we don't think to! use it. (You don't look for
a phone when you need a fire extinguisher.) It's possible honk speeds
are better in India, where no one overlooks the horn, and the honking
is more existential than aggressive. Of course, the street noise there
can be literally deafening, and India's roads have one of the highest
death rates in the world.

Perhaps the world just needs more standardized honking education. Here
are some tips from AAA on how to use the horn to warn a child cyclist:
"Ideally, you should sound the horn when you're about a half-block
away … If you blast the horn at close range, you'll startle the
cyclist. He may look over his left shoulder in surprise and steer
inadvertently into your path. Worse, he may lose control a! nd fall
directly in front of you."

In other words: If you see a kid on a bike and he's at least a half-
block away (the block being the standard unit of distance used by
AAA's honking scientists), then give a toot. But take ca If you
screw up, you may crush his tiny body beneath your wheels. This kind
of messaging hardly helps: Instead of teaching us good behavior, it
makes us afraid of the horn and takes the joy out of honking.

The truth is, many cities have already ruled out all the lighthearted,
benign uses of the horn—rolling up to a girlfriend's house with a cool
beep-beep, practicing Morse code in the grocery store parking lot … S-
O-S … Saaaaave Ouuuur Shiiiiip! Even honking to! celebrate Obama can
get you a ticket. All that's left now are the aforementioned and
ineffective "emergency" hoots. If that's the case, maybe we should
eliminate honking altogether.

In Berlin in 1936, the Nazis put yellow spots on the cars of people
who honked unnecessarily. The honking ceased. Memphis in the 1950s was
called "the quietest city" thanks to a tough horn law. But horn bans
are hard to enforce and maintain. In Cairo, drivers outmaneuvered an
ordinance by reverting to squeeze horns. Shanghai's ban last year
reportedly inspired one driver to install a custom horn that played a
recording: "Please mind the car, we are making a turn." New Yorkers
honk unflinchingly in the face of the city's many silly "Don't Honk"
signs. Hey, man, fre e speech!

New weapons are joining the War on Honking. The Automobile Horn Audit
System could track honk rate and location and transmit data to a state-
run central computer. Australia is deploying "noise cameras." And in a
nod to the Nazis, some Manhattanites want to fit cabs with lights to
identify deviant honkers. Others say, Let's turn up the honk volume
inside cars. The boors among us prefer eggs, or Taliban-style hand
dismemberment. A more modest proposal, made by psychologist Charles
Spence, is to replace the horn with a sharp spike protruding from the
steering wheel. The spike would make driving "feel more dangerous," so
people would go slower.

Last summer I was in Colombia on vacation, and one day I visited
downtown Medellin. I was sporting sunglasses, short pants, and dirty
white flip-flops. Near the Botero sculpture garden, after checking my
map, I stepped into the road. A spray of honks ensued. Cars and
motorbikes buzzed past. I felt as if I'd been Tased. But I was alive:
a well-timed honk had saved my life.

Or mayb! e it hadn't. It felt like a near-miss, but the driver had
seen me seve ral seconds earlier, in time to honk me out of the way.
Maybe he didn't even need to honk. Maybe he could have braked instead.
That's what my mom would have done. Or what if his car had been
equipped with the spike?

Horns don't honk at people. People honk at people. Whatever
legislative remedies or gadgeteer fixes we can invent, I'm counting on
one fact: We won't give up our horns until they're pried from our
cold, dead, honking hands.

Dave Johns is a writer and public-radio producer in New York.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2204988/