By Dave Johns
Sunday, November 30, 2008

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; 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.

For years I've been telling my mom that she ought to learn to honk a little more. After all, honking is a venerable automotive tradition. Just over a century ago, Henry Ford's first Model T rolled 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 such as India and China, where hordes of new drivers are now navigating ancient tenement districts, horn-honking is so constant that it is a major noise problem. Last year, Shanghai banned honking downtown, with the prohibition set to expand to the entire city. Cairo is the unofficial honking capital of the world. Islamabad, Ho Chi Minh City, Lima, Katmandu, Accra and New York have issues.

In theory, the horn is a safety device; it might rightly be called the w 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.

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 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.

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. He found that drivers never steered and honked at the same time, and usually 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.

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.

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 and fall directly in front of you."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. 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.

Last summer I was in Colombia on vacation, and one day I visited downtown Medellín. 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 maybe it hadn't. It felt like a near-miss, but the driver had seen me several 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.

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