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.
Maybe if drivers didn't want their hearing damaged they'd push for horns that were quieter outside the car too. After all the parent's comment merely says that horns should be as loud inside the car as outside — not louder. Currently, horns are externalized and so drivers don't care how loud they are. By internalizing the cost, they'd care enough to lower it. Or go deaf. Their choice. But at least it's a choice they'd care about.
> After all the parent's comment merely says that horns should be as loud inside the car as outside — not louder
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.
The ability of others to exist outside of a vehicle does not have any implication on whether the other driver is in one regardless of how convenient it would be if it did.
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.
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.
It'd be nice to see horn volume tied to speedometer or outside noise level (maybe some already are?). After all it's meant to be a safety device not a device you can stick your ear next to comfortably in any scenario.
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 the horns quiet enough for the nearby pedestrians, they'll be too quiet for other drivers to hear (since they're further away and the car is blocking a lot of the sound). And the driver might have the radio on, or even if not it's got to overcome the road noise.
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.
Maybe as well as an audiable signal a radio signal can be emitted. Cars hear this radio signal and play a horn inside to the driver. Eventually when this is supported by all cars the outside horn can be made quieter (just for nearby pedestrians) as penetration through a different car that is playing loud music is no longer an issue.
Of course the depreciation period for this is enormous.
20 years ago California installed sound walls on all freeways through residential areas when studies found severe health effects. Not sure this is really "waking up to the problems"...
My version of this is that horns should automatically activate the high beams while honking. Should be trivial to implement and it would allow anyone to identify who is honking on a busy road.
Unfortunately, high beams also risk blinding oncoming traffic, potentially causing a collision.
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).
Can you describe such a situation? As far as my thought process goes, the horn is meant to attract attention, and lights only help that purpose.
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?
Wasn't it once upon a time, you had to stop your car, stop your engine, get out and fire a gun before crossing a corner?
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.
I grew up in Colorado and I was always taught to beep the horn just before every blind corner on those one lane or barely two lane roads that wind through the mountain.
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.
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.