On Honking

Like Dave Johns’ mother, I’d say I’m not much of a honker. That’s partly due to my personality and partly due to the way I learned to drive, which included lessons in defensive driving that emphasized preventing and avoiding collisions instead of just making them noisier.

There are situations, however, when honking is very, very underused. For example: at an intersection near my parents’ home, there’s a right turn-only lane that, after the light, is continued by a left-merge lane. The idea is that one lane of traffic only will line up and go straight through the intersection. During rush hour, this situation is regularly abused by a small group of assholes who go straight in the right-only lane, cutting in front of the civilized people who played fair and followed the rules. Then they get into the left-merge lane and easily pass by 50 people waiting in line. The worst part is that the maneuver is only visible to very few drivers at the front of the line; almost everyone who’s been victimized is way too far back to see it. Whenever, from the back of the line, I used to see someone pull into the right-only lane and pull this sneaky trick, I would honk. But I’d not only honk, I’d do it loud and hard, and most importantly, I’d point a finger directly at the offender, so that all the other drivers could see who was getting chastised. I like to believe I helped to slow the decivilizing trend of traffic abuses in this way, and wished that other drivers had joined me in socially ostracizing the cheaters. Unfortunately, very few did.

Part of this, and part of the reason why a lot of people don’t honk when they should, is that honking is actually neutral. There are a lot of different causes for honking: honking to prevent a collision; honking to express general dissatisfaction that traffic isn’t moving; honking to express direct dissatisfaction with a particular driver’s behavior; honking to thank another driver for a favor; honking at friends in another car; and rhythmic honking.

What, you may ask, is rhythmic honking? It’s my name for this: honk, honk, honk-honk-honk, honk-honk-honk-honk, honk-honk. This practice is usually done immediately after a major sporting event, by men in their 20s or 30s who are too drunk or too stupid to be driving anyway, in a vain attempt to extend to the street the great feeling they experienced in the stadium while their team was winning. Rhythmic honking is so annoying, and the people who do it are so antisocial, that I think rhythmic honkers should all probably be castrated.

Anyway, back to the inherent neutrality of the honk. Honking isn’t always good or always bad. It’s almost always impossible to tell right away who honked at whom, and why. Moreover, a honk lasts less than a second, so a driver who’s just cut off 30 people and gotten honked at 30 times for it only has to drive another block to escape the unpleasant feeling of everyone else’s angry glares. That’s why, even though I think a car horn is a good evolutionary step away from actual violence and towards solving problems nonviolently, I think cars should have their horns removed and replaced with paint ball guns.

How would paint ball guns be better than horns? Mostly for two reasons:

1. A paint ball stain lasts far longer than the sound of a horn. So if you’ve been paint balled for being a bad driver, everyone is going to know it for at least as long as it takes for you to apply a new paint job.
2. A hit with a paint ball causes actual cosmetic damage to a car, which translates to money. This means that, if you want to keep a nice paint job on your mobile investment, you’d be wise not to treat other drivers poorly.

Obviously there are plenty of reasons why paint ball would be problematic, but I’m confident that they could be deployed safely and fairly, and that they’d be far more effective than horns.

Of course, all of the above should be applied only to societies that are basically civilized and not to a place where, perversely, drivers actually want to be honked at. What? Is there such a place? Yes, and I live in it. Here in Israel, the main aim of every person, at all times, is not to be made into a frayer. Because the only way to be sure that you’re not the frayer is to make sure that someone else is the frayer, it’s customary for average people to treat each other like trash and not to feel bad about it at all. This is why, as Ari, my first roommate in Jerusalem, explained to me, honking in Israel is never a good idea: bad drivers who elicit honks from other people are proud of it instead of ashamed. This is also why replacing horns with paint ball guns would be an even worse idea here. And … I have no solution for this problem.