i. Shanghai
In 2007, honking was banned in Shanghai within the city limits (外环)[1]. I was six years old. When I first learned of the new law, I felt not for or against, but confused. Why did carmakers spend money making horns, which are apparently so evil that they need to be outlawed? It’s like making pockets that you can’t put things in.
That’s when I learned about the concept of road rage. Since then, I’ve noticed road rage all around me. Just two days ago, I witnessed the classic duo: the driver in front extending a middle finger out of the car window, shouting incoherently, while the driver in the back honks over and over as he inches to almost touch the car in front. Had I been in either car, I’d have been held hostage to a monologue about their fleeting feud — who wronged whom, and why the world needed to know.
Every driver who honked with me in the passenger seat in Shanghai was filed as a rude driver in my young mind.They werealways enraged about something, sometimes as small as being stopped by a red light because the car in front won’t run the yellow light. The honks always came with colorful swears...yet those drivers never hit anyone or were hit. They were just impatient people.
ii. The Garden State Parkway
In 2016, I had just left Shanghai for New Jersey for high school. My mother, an experienced driver though new to driving in the US, was driving on a sluggish highway. Behind us was an ostentatiously loud driver with his window rolled down who played music so loud I could hear it through the closed windows. I found him annoying as someone who did not want to be subjected to that music for long, since we were barely moving. He kept intermittently honking at us. We looked at each other and the road again; nothing seemed wrong. Then, he passed us on the right, wildly gesturing, seemingly angrily, honking some more.
I had just settled in the U.S. and had recently heard about the stereotype that Asians can’t drive[2]. I shrugged and told my mom that’s probably it. We chose not to engage, having no interest in finding out what came after the honking.
Thirty minutes later, we were home. We got out of the car and tried to get the groceries out from the trunk. When we turned around to the back of the car, we were stunned that the trunk lid was only ajar, and not fully locked down. We soon came to understand that the honker was probably not raging, let alone racist. He was trying to help us realize something was wrong with our car.
iii. Suburban High School
American high school was also my first experience with public-facing activism. I was not an activist myself, but I had witnessed my peers congregating near the gate holding up colorful homemade cardboard signs.
Honk if you support x
In the golden hour, parents on their way to pick up students drove by and let out short intermittent honks. The students’ faces glowed with effervescent joy.
It was celebratory noise pollution, the kind of noise pollution that isn’t ok in cities like Shanghai and NYC, like firecrackers[3], but apparently support-expressing in the suburbs.
iv. Philadelphia
When I was 17, I had just gotten my license with bare-minimum practice. My friend wanted to spend her birthday in Philadelphia. I was to drive to a local train station and take the NJ Transit there. When I arrived at the train station, I looped around the parking lot, only to realize it was entirely full because construction blocked off 1⁄3 of the space. To make things worse, unable to park, I got a text from another friend that the train had left 3 minutes early and she got on it but was not able to make it wait.
I checked the train schedule and realized I would have to be an hour late to someone else’s birthday plans. In a panic, I decided to drive all the way there, as all other options sounded worse. Problem was that I had never driven any remotely complex roads before—having received the driver’s ed in suburbia easy mode—and had only been on a highway for 1 hour total under supervision.
In the next hour, I made every possible mistake short of hitting someone.
Ran half a red light. HONK. (by a surprising kind police car who did not chase me down) Reversed back to stop line.
Almost ran up a highway exit ramp. HONKS. (by everyone) K-turned myself outta there.
Drove 20 meters on the opposing lane without realizing. HOOOOONK. (by a car next to me). Found refuge in a dead-end.
At the end, I made it to a parking garage, drenched in sweat, and ended with a very gentle bump on the side of the garage entrance. (No honk this time since no one was around). Pretty sure I overpaid for parking too, seeing as I had no preparation to compare prices and also could not operate Google maps while driving.
v. Cats
Even cat lovers are sometimes frustrated by a cat who plays too rough, scratching skin or biting down too hard. One reason this happens is how they were raised.
When kittens play with adult cats, they often engage in play-fighting. Play-fighting is how kittens learn to be cats, learning vital skills like pouncing on prey. It certainly gets physical, but there are boundaries. For example, they should retract their nails when play-fighting, but they should unsheathe them when actually attempting to catch and kill prey. Kittens aren’t born with that knowledge. They’re very excitable and often piss the adults off with their nonstop scrapping and cavorting. The adults, upon getting pissed off, will hiss at the kittens, momentarily scaring the bejesus out of them. The kittens will back off, but a few moments later will come back to play fight some more, only this time more appropriately.
When humans raise kittens, they’re often too gentle and tolerant of these experimental behaviors, which means when those kittens grow up, they will not have learned proper boundaries of how to play vs. fight. They will scratch you.
These days I’m no longer 17 with an unreasonably pressing desire to be at a birthday party on time, but I still appreciate being honked at. I’ve always been more of a NUMTOT type, and the social contract of driving is not my mother tongue. Thus, when I get that half-second honk for unnecessarily waiting to turn left at a green light at a T-shaped intersection, I’m thankful.
If you’re savvy with how the local roads work, honk gently to help other drivers at confusing spots. Be cognizant of high-density residential areas, and don’t press it too long, but do honk. Do it.
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This rule has been in place since 1936 in New York City; the only exception is to warn parties under imminent danger.
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In my experience, Asian immigrants follow a slightly different set of rules and etiquettes when driving. They have lower accident rates in chaotic situations, e.g. like in their home countries, because they understand when to drive more assertively and more defensively among different types of agents when there are no rules. However, this sometimes does not translate to countries with more comprehensive traffic conventions, possibly leading to the stereotype.
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Banned in Shanghai since 2016, the year I left, along with fireworks. Commonly used during Chinese New Year for celebrations.
A car horn is an emergency device, and a tricky one to use properly. It’s not something you should be using unless there’s a genuine safety issue. The horn basically tries to blow up the situation in the hope that the pieces will settle into a better configuration than what you have. It can easily startle somebody into doing the opposite of the right thing, or failing to recover from something they otherwise would have recovered from.
The only message a horn can send is “pay attention”. It can’t say to what, and in any situation where it’s actually likely to get used, there are probably going to be a lot of candidates. Not only that, but it draws instinctive attention to itself, and thus away from the real issue. You don’t keep honking, or even start honking, at somebody whose trunk is open. They’ll never figure it out.
It’s also annoying and disturbing to everybody around. Everywhere in a big city is dense enough that you’re going to disturb a lot of people if you get on that horn. Your having to wait at a light isn’t a sufficient excuse for that.
Blowing through red lights, or driving the wrong way on ramps, or the like, are, of course, serious safety issues worthy of being honked at, and the sort of thing where you have some chance the target will get the right message. However, the right answer for somebody who finds themselves creating such serious issues three times in a one hour trip is to get off the road and miss the birthday party. Then you actually learn what you’re doing before you get yourself into that kind of situation again.
Driving up an exit ramp should cause a total freakout in every fiber of your being, no matter how flustered you are. If it doesn’t, you’re not adequately trained and shouldn’t be there. Neither should a person who chooses to drive while flustered to the point of losing their skills. Arguably neither should a person who routinely loses track of when it’s their turn to go at a light.
I see your point here, but I still think honking is good. In dense environments—cities as you say—honking should be reserved for emergencies, which Philadelphia was one. Density and necessity of honks are both on a spectrum; one should take both into account.
The anecdote about my first time driving in a city was not to excuse my poor judgment and recommend noobs rely on being honked to improve their judgement. I have, since, not made such mistakes ever again, including on the way back that day, but it was impossible to judge my unpreparedness accurately before actually trying it. (After all, I did pass the driving test smoothly.) Thus, insofar as some drivers will be bad sometimes, honking at them helps, because they know they’re bad but they probably don’t know when they’re particularly screwing up.
The other point about honking not conveying enough bits of information is true but what are the alternatives short of speaking to them (often not an option) or bumping into them (not good)? I’ve seen people flashing their headlights but that’s circumstantial (night, heading your way).
An open trunk means an unsecured load, and an unsecured load is a safety problem. But yeah, a honk alone isn’t enough to communicate about it.
Trouble is, once someone forms the hypothesis “this is someone raging at me” they’re going to have a hard time updating to “this is someone trying to help me”.
Dude should maybe have turned down his music if he’s sincerely trying to communicate to another driver. In slow highway traffic it’s totally possible to holler “Trunk’s open!” and be heard … but not over chunky bass.
FWIW 10-20 years earlier (not sure your age) this wouldn’t have been a problem, because Google maps didn’t exist. You would have simply had no way to find your way to Philadelphia, and would have either waited or turned around and gone home. A decade before that you would have had no way to let your friends know any of what had happened. Although, in that era you’d probably have gone to the train station substantially earlier as a just-in-case precaution, or met up with your friends in advance and carpooled to the station. I mention this out of a general sense that older people have in general become much less willing to (metaphorically) honk/hiss at young people (or let others do so), in ways that leave us/them (depending on your cutoff for ‘young’) much less equipped to become competent adults, without actually trying to find an effective alternate teaching method.
What about paper maps? Asking someone for directions?
True, good point. But if I try to imagine the OP taking that route, as a young new driver unfamiliar with the route, in the Philly metro area, I find it hard to imagine that going well? And I would expect them to anticipate the not-going-well and thereby avoid getting into that situation?
The entire region is extremely frustrating for outsiders to navigate even with GPS, and in my experience maps and asking for directions don’t help much. My dad used to be a wholesaler on Long Island, he dispatched trucks to Philly all the time and knew the whole region’s highway system very well, but pre-GPS whenever I asked for directions they ended up being unusably inadequate for one reason or another if I lacked sufficient local knowledge. Otherwise an exit closure or wrong turn became almost unrecoverable. Granted, I have an unusually terrible direction sense.