Another thing that I have maintained for quite some time is that car horns should be at as loud inside the car as out. It's kinda crazy to me that we're ok with people making such loud noises while being completely isolated from them.
I get what you're trying to accomplish, disincentivize people against honking excessively, but it's a bit like trying to prevent stabbings by only selling knives without handles.
I think we should be looking into more effective ways for people to communicate among vehicles, honestly.
But this is precisely what makes no sense as the requirement for the high volume never came from how loud it was to the person that hit the horn in the first place. The driver you're trying to signal is going to be inside a vehicle therefore it needs to be loud enough to be heard from inside a vehicle.
False
Something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31309299 can be thought of to try to solve both problems instead of limiting good solutions to be only those for a single perspective.
Loudness falls off pretty fast.
You shouldn't be using your horn often enough to do that anyway, and if a single honk is loud enough to damage your hearing in this case, it's also loud enough to damage the hearing of a pedestrian walking near you.
I say do it. It'd be a strong disincentive to use your horn unnecessarily.
If you're going 70 and want to signal to the guy left of you to not merge into you "it's too loud for a pedestrian to safely stand right next to" isn't very relevant (in both perspectives). At the same time if you're going <5 mph on a comparatively quiet backed up street there is no reason it has to be the same volume as the first case.
If you make it the painful for the driver to use the horn, they just won't (which would maybe be better overall in cities, but then just remove the horn entirely). Or the sudden loud noise will surprise the driver, or make them instinctively cover their ears (i.e., remove both hands from the wheel). Neither of those would be good for safety.
So, unfortunately, not an easy problem.
In suburban and especially rural areas, the horn needs to carry further and there a few pedestrians. But I guess you could adjust volume by GPS location.
Of course the depreciation period for this is enormous.
In addition, I wonder if the blinking would be distracting, calling attention away from the problem (at least when the horn is being used as intended, not just by someone complaining about slow traffic).
If you are driving on a dark road with traffic coming on the opposite lane (the only situation I can conceive where high beam blinding is a problem), why would you sit on the horn for more than 1/2 a second?
Problem is, even if you make them so, they won't be as loud inside the other car as they are out.
And further, there was a thing that in some mountain passes muleteers had to fire their gun before crossing, and there's a story of two muleteers that fired at the same time (this story ignored speed of sound) and met halfway in the pass, and at a coin flip, had to decide who had to drop his mule down the cliff so the other could pass. The story was told from the perspective of the flip loser.
Signals are hard.
I still do this now that we live in SF. Anytime I'm on my bike and come across a blind corner I whistle loudly, it's saved me a few times.