Horn Please!

Anyone who has ever plied the highways and byways of India knows this illustrious tradition. With people, ox carts, sacred cows crowding across highways… burros, camels, bicycles, motor bikes, piled high and wide with large and often heavy roads… and the buses and trucks dodging zooming cars to run the delivery routes of this huge country. Watch IRT Deadliest Roads on the History Channel if you want to see how bad it really is. The horn is simply the best way to survive on South Asia’s roads. Drivers live with their hands and elbows pressing the horn button, wailing sirens at all times of the day or night. Damn, it’s loud. And yes, most truck drivers have that “Horn Please!” sign on the back of their vehicles.

But why is that “horny tradition” now migrating into the United States? Have you noticed this trend in your neighborhood? More car horns? I live near a local high school, and kids, late for class in lines of slowly moving cars outside my door blare and bleep every school day morning, as if their noise will make the slightest improvement. Loud bass-enhanced hip-hop is punctuated with car horns. Beeping a horn in a Beverly Hills residential district is a $147 fine, but I’ve never seen a police stop for this offense. In New York, the fines go up to $350, but if you’ve been in Manhattan recently, I suspect you haven’t noticed an increase in peace and quiet! Or the NYPD pulling over a “horny miscreant.” While NYPD issued only an average of a ticket and a half a day as recently as 2006 for the “unnecessary use of horn,” there are 8 million people in that city!

When the earliest automobile drivers decided that some kind of warning device might be a good idea, there were little bells and what I call “clown horns” clamped unceremoniously near the driver. The November 24^th AutosAOL describes the evolving “history of the car horn”: “As cars grew faster and became ubiquitous, a stronger horn was needed. One was the Gabriel, a multi-toned exhaust horn popular in the 1910S and 20s, but which eventually faded in popularity in favor of the Klaxon, whose sound arrived by an electric vibrating metal diaphragm and emitted the popular, familiar and goofy ‘ah-oo-ga.”

“Automakers eventually settled on a single-tone electric horn, usually tuned to an E-flat or C. Dual-tone horns were found to pieces through traffic noise more effectively by the 1960s, and the tones themselves went up to a shriller F-sharp and A-sharp. At the same time, auto cockpits began to grow increasingly quieter, due to consumer demand. Today, it’s tough for a driver with windows closed and music on to hear even an emergency vehicle, let alone a prolonged horn blast.”

Heavier traffic, congested roads, difficult times and increasing levels of frustration have produced a definite increase in blaring horns here in the United States. Parisians prefer flashing their lights to beeping away at the horn button. Hey, Americans? Good wine, great food, and no horns! And don’t think car makers don’t know exactly what they are selling, horn-wise. When Hyundai got complaints that the horn on their Sonata car was too wimpy, they quickly replaced that little squeaker with the louder dual-shell version. Yeah, folks car enough not to buy are car if it doesn’t been loud enough. Go figure… and then try and get some rest in a quiet corner… which wouldn’t be my neighborhood on a school day!

I’m Peter Dekom, and whatever happened to that “do unto others” thang?