Here’s the scenario: you’re cruising along at 40mph on a 35mph business road. A car pulls out of a store parking lot in front of you, going in the same direction. It’s a moderately aggressive move, requiring you to apply the brakes to avoid a collision, but you were paying attention and had plenty of time to slow down. Do you
A) Go about your business like a rational human being, or
B) Lay on the horn for 5 seconds to let the other driver know just how much you didn’t approve of that little maneuver. After all, if you don’t teach them a lesson, who will?
Yes, the irony of me starting a thread about how I’m annoyed that people get irrationally annoyed is not lost on me. Still, I think people honk too much. The horn is there to prevent a potential collision. Once the collision is avoided, the horn is not there to express emotions.
I completely agree. Driving is a practical matter, not a moral matter. You don’t have a moral right to never have to slow down and let someone in front of you.
Is the honk integral to your attempts at avoiding a collision? Like, if the other drive hears your horn, will they be able to adjust their behavior in a positive way that will immediately reduce the odds of an impact?
Often times people honk when the other driver is already in the way. At that point the honk is pointless.
eta: Honking in that situation can actually make the situation worse, as peoples’ natural instinct to hearing a horn is often hit their own brakes. Do you really want a car that’s just pulled out in front of you forcing you to slam on your brakes to slow down?
I’m not taking either of my hands off the steering wheel. Nobody’s going to learn anything from a car horn – hell, they won’t learn anything if you scream it, sweetly, in their face.
They don’t really have a moral right to pull out and cause me to slam on my brakes, causing me to narrowly miss hitting them, and tossing my dogs around in the back seat, just so that they can be in front of me.
What does honking do in this situation? Well, apparently, they were not aware of cars approaching the intersection that they pulled out, and by honking, I can let them know how close their inattentiveness was to causing an accident, hopefully reminding them to be more cautious in the future to prevent future accidents.
People honk in all sorts of situations that are not narrow avoidances of actual accidents. They honk Just because they had to slow down a little, even when none of the things you stated above happened–no slamming on brakes, no disturbing of dogs, etc. They honk just because they’re annoyed that someone else is in front of them now who wasn’t before.
Arguably, they do, if you wouldn’t have had to slam on your brakes if you had been obeying the speed limit.
I mostly agree with eveything you said in your post; but if the car pulling out misjudged how safe it was to do so because they didn’t realize how far above the speed limit that other car was going, that changes things.
Some do. The one that always confuses me is why people honk in gridlock traffic.
I suppose that may happen occasionally, but mostly I see people honk at others out of frustration over someone else deciding that their time is more important than yours. If you made someone “slow down a little”, then you have inconvenienced them, for your own benefit.
But sure, some people do honk too much, and that leads directly to confirmation bias that people in general are honking too much, due to the fact that you notice the one car who honks, but not the 10,000 other cars that you saw that didn’t honk, which leads to assertions as to why they do so, which may very well be incorrect.
But yeah, if someone pulls out in front of me in such a way that I have to react to them to avoid a collision, they’re gonna get a beep, to remind them not to be so inattentive or selfish, whichever it is that caused them to do so.
That said, the other day, I went to honk at someone who wasn’t turning left on green with no oncoming traffic for as far as could be seen, and found my horn was not working, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had used it.
HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK!!!
The German half of me knows that the most important piece of a car is the gas pedal, but the Spanish half disagrees. I read Madrid is one of the loudest cities in the world and I can easily believe that. Sorry for the noise.
As I told a friend the other day as he was laying on the horn in frustration, “That noise doesn’t say which car is doing the honking, and it doesn’t say who the honking is directed at, so what the hell do you think you are accomplishing?”
I seldom use the horn, and not in a situation like the OP’s, where I have sufficient time to react and avoid a problem. I may however think unkind thoughts.
On the other hand, if I’ve had to employ emergency braking or massively swerve to avoid an accident, I might just let the other driver know that he/she narrowly avoided disaster and that it might be time to put down the cellphone.
About 2008, someone asked Cartalk the same question,
If I recall correctly, Tom’s answer was that the honk served as feedback to the offender that she/he did something wrong. And that feedback was helpful in correcting behavior
It is actually illegal in Australia to sound your horn except as a warning to other road users and animals of the position of the vehicle, or as part of an anti theft system. The odd sucker gets booked by a cop for being a smartass.
But I resist the urge. I wouldn’t know if my horn works. This despite, only days ago, someone darting out of a pub parking lot, across 2 lanes of traffic while I was approaching at 80kph and there was 100 yards of empty road behind me. I’m sure that my headlights, very close to the driver’s side window, let him know what a fuckwit he was.
I watch those “Idiots in cars” compilations on youtube.
There are just so many times where a car pulls out or is changing lanes, and the car with the dashcam honks for 2…3…more seconds before *crunch*
How can you have time to honk, but not time to brake or swerve?
(Answering my own question, it might be that sometimes the dashcam gives a misleading view and/or sensation of speed, and perhaps they had less time than it appeared. But still, for me I always either have time to anticipate what someone was going to do, in which case I just do whatever defensive thing I needed to do. Or, in the very rare times that someone does something so dangerous that even *I* didn’t see it coming, I only have time to brake, no time to honk).