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Comment by jenadine | Hacker News Reader

I live near an intersection, and the most annoying noise is honking. Why do driver have to honk so much is beyond me.

Also quite annoying is ambulance/police. They are really loud.

The only time I hear a honk in my home country of Finland is when someone's asleep at the wheel when the light goes green, or a drunken pedestrian stumbles in front of a bus.

When visiting Alicante, Spain, I couldn't believe the constant honking all around the city. I caught an ambulance on video, sirens blazing, stuck in a roundabout for like 10 minutes right outside a hospital. Something about the driving culture just seems so wildly disorganized and impolite to me.

Fire/ambulance/police are supposed to be exceptionally loud so they can get drivers attention and then they can get through. (I expect you know this already, but I'm making sure we're all on the same page.)

Over time cabins in vehicles have gotten more isolated with better sound systems. Outside has gotten generally louder. Both of these things mean the emergency sirens need to be even louder for it to get a drivers attention.

I'm not sure if it is because drivers don't hear/see them or if they just don't care anymore, but almost every time I see a firetruck with it's lights and sirens on lately, I see it have to come to a stop and wait, get on the even louder horn, before drivers start getting out of its way. This isn't down the whole length of the street or anything, just once or twice before it drives out of my view (several blocks). I don't think I ever saw in person this before 10 years ago.

The problem is that horns and sirens typically provide little practical benefit. Even in an emergency situation like a heart attack, arriving an extra minute or two faster rarely improves patient outcomes. Essentially, these noises are put on for show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/us/sirens-noise-ambulance...

A horn, when heard as a pedestrian, is extremely loud, but it's not that loud to the driver using the horn, or to other drivers, since they are shielded by their vehicles. If the horn were as loud inside the vehicle (or close to it) as it is outside of the vehicle, then drivers might be dissuaded from using the horn frivolously. A regulation could be enacted that mandates that the horn's volume inside the car be closer to the volume of the horn when heard outside of the car.

Oh my god I'm so lucky to live in a culture where unnecessary honking is almost nonexistent…

Honking is basically the only real way drivers have to communicate with the world outside their car. When a honk is needed to say anything you have to use it for everything.

(The contrast is particularly stark against e.g. cycling where you can just match pace with a stranger and hold a brief conversation about whatever happened.)

Honking is about drivers releasing their frustration and nothing else.

For one thing, everyone in other cars have their ACs and music on and cannot hear the honking anyways. So you’re not communicating with them anyways. And if you’re honking at pedestrians in a first world country you’re driving wrong.

I think I can count on two hands the amount of times I've used my horn in 20 years of driving.

It's used for when I think someone hasn't seen me (ie. reversing), or if the lights have turned green and the person isn't paying attention. The latter will be a bump on the horn (so about 100ms) where I doubt it gets up to full volume.

People are quite happy to wind down the window in order to show their displeasure with a hand gesture where I live.

Which city?

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