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Of course it is an offence to beep as a rebuke - there was a bit of a hoohah when a driver (in Liverpool?) was fined for honking at a pedestrian who was forced the driver to slow down (but wasn't then in any danger of being knocked down).
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Use of your horn is an art. It's all in the timing - you have to pick your moment precisely in that split second when it's still obvious why you're sounding off and at whom, but by the time the other guy has realised what's going on his moment has passed and you're off on your way.
Victory is yours.
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horns should be banned!
they promote the brave little soldier in his tin box...........
Seriously what good use have they? most of the above talks about reaction to a mistake do they actually fix anything or just wind people up?
Theres far too much stress out there, beeping horns just adds to it!
back to you
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horns should be banned! >>
Well, an 'audible warning of approach' is useful. I use the horn to warn other roadusers who may not have - or who dfinitely have not - seen my approach, eg drivers who look as though they are about to pull out who are looking the other way, and approaching blind bends in narrow country lanes (I just hope oncoming drivers haven't got their radios/CD players turned up loud).
All part of advanced driving stuff.
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horns should be banned! <<
Today's OEM horns aren't much good anyway.
I remember using my Suzuki's horn when a Mercedes driver came flying out of a side road with a phone glued to his ear. I'm sure he thought the suzi's feeble bleat was a call waiting signal
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and approaching blind bends in narrow countrylanes >> All part of advanced driving stuff.
Not outside my house please. I'd prefer it if you slowed down to a speed appropriate to the road circumstances.
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>All part of advanced driving stuff.
No its not. One drives to maximise the view ahead by postioning, or at an appropriate speed where one cant. As you say most drivers may well have some in car audio on that would render the pathetic "parp" that most cars make these days inaudible.
Dont "parp" on blind corner country lanes. You may well make that horse just round the corner bolt and kill its rider,
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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This morning while walking to work i observed someone zooming straight ahead across a mini roundabout doing at least 25mph despite the fact that someone was turning right from his right and was already half way across....!!
There was a very loud and prolonged sounding of a horn as the driver from the right slammed on his anchors and only narrowly avoided getting rammed on his left wing by the said zoomer - I would say the clearance was less that six inches.
The zoomer never even applied his brakes [ I had a rear view - the lights did not come on ]; if anything I heard his engine rev up as he entered the roundabout.
In that instance, I would suggest the driver coming from the right was perfectly justified in his use of the horn?
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>All part of advanced driving stuff. No its not. One drives to maximise the view ahead by postioning, or at an appropriate speed where one cant. As you say most drivers may well have some in car audio on that would render the pathetic "parp" that most cars make these days inaudible. Dont "parp" on blind corner country lanes. You may well make that horse just round the corner bolt and kill its rider, ------------------------------ TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
Oh yes it is. One uses it in conjunction with positioning as you describe and, CP, with appropriate speed reduction too - 10 mph or less if need be. And on a one-track road with high hedges/banks with next to zero visibility round 90 degree bends one is more likely to come across a car being driven thoughtlessly than a horse with rider. Horseriders need to consider other roadusers too, of course.
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See Roadcraft p25 and p96.
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Pedestrians or horse riders on country lanes don't feel the need to blow horns in order to avoid walking into each other on blind corners. That's because they are travelling at an appropriate speed. If you can stop in the distance you can see ahead to be clear, then you don't need a horn either.
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Really? Consider a hump-back bridge, one vehicle wide, with no view of vehicles approaching from the far side. Yes, you can crawl up to the top, ready to stop at a moment's notice, but it's of little value if something coming the other way is going too fast to stop. A toot of the horn on the approach to the bridge might just make the difference.
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Not much point in hooting for blind bends unless you have a really loud horn. And if you do, as has been suggested, you may frighten a horse. Just what put people off the automobile when it first appeared (the danger of alarming horses I mean).
Of course a person on a horse has a much better chance of being able to see over the hedge than a car driver, and by the same token of being seen. And they really do appreciate it if you slow down and don't just go blasting past. You still see people doing that on main roads in the country. Boorish in the extreme.
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It would be a foolish rider who chose a single track lane with very tight bends to ride down.
Mind you a lot of them are in my experience
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It would be a foolish driver who chose a single track lane with very tight bends to drive down. Mind you a lot of them are in my experience
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I'm sure that's witty but I don't see your point.
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Another example, very close to (my) home. 300m or so from my house is a T-junction where my road crosses the end of another. Nothing unusual in that, but the T is more of an italic T, which makes it practically impossible for a four-wheeled vehicle to turn left without using both sides of the road it's entering. This doesn't stop the occasional driver from beginning the turn after a casual rightward look down the road without looking up to the left. I've learned to anticipate this by watching the eyes of the driver at the junction, and a quick peep of the horn has occasionally been a valuable attention grabber.
Cliff's point is a sound one, to the extent that if we all drove with perfect regard to the road conditions and the safety of ourselves and others, there'd be no need for a horn; in the world we actually live and drive in, though, it still has a place.
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I'm sure that's witty but I don't see your point.
Just that the roads and lanes are for the use of everyone - pedestrians, horse riders, motorists, herds of cows, children playing hopscotch, etc.
No one group has the right to monopolise it, nor assume that by the use of a horn everyone else has to clear the road so that Mr Toad can drone by in a cloud of dust. There is nothing inherently more foolish than taking a horse down a narrow lane with blind corners than in taking a car . Both probably have their reasons for going that way. The motorist may be taking a short cut, the horse rider may live there.
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I understand the point you're making but I think every road user has a responsibility to weigh up the balance of risks and probabilities of using a given stretch of road ansd come to a decision about whether they are likely to be the exception rather than the norm at that point.
If you assumed that any possible hazard was equally likely to be round any bend then we'd get nowhere. I live in an area with more than its fair share of horses and drive with that in mind but the number of riders I (barely) see in fading light with no lights on is remarkable, equally riders who approach blind bends chatting away two abreast and then stare at you as if you should be crawling along just in case they have chosen to use the road with no forethought is also quite remarkable.
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"If you can stop in the distance you can see ahead to be clear, then you don't need a horn either."
I can stop OK. It's the other bloke I'm worried about. I'm glad some others on here have a balanced view of things. There are a few who think tghey know everything and have figured out all the angles, and thus can learn nothing from anyone else.
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>>"If you can stop in the distance you can see ahead to be clear, then you don't need a horn either."
>>I can stop OK. It's the other bloke I'm worried about
I to feel this thinking is flawed for narrow road blind corners. Ideally i think it should be HALF the distance you can see to be clear. Stopping in the distance you can see to be clear works fine for stationary obstructions in the road but not for cyclists / cars coming towards you.
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I very rarely use the horn, everyday driving mistakes don't bother me and I can never seem to find it in time anyway, I usually end up with the wipers on max. I wouldn't go so far as to say we should do away with them though, I changed lane the other day (without indicating) and had the person sitting perfectly in my blind spot not sounded his horn I would have hit him. Whether he did so in anger or to warn of his presence doesn't matter, his action avoided a collision.
The last time I used my horn in anger was at a ditherer. They do bother me. We were in traffic and he was so slow at pulling away every time the traffic moved that five or six cars from the next lane would push in front of him. I wanted to ram him but I settled for a few squirts of the horn and a "wake up dopey" at the top of my voice. Unfortunately, he was still in front of me five miles later as we turned into my street and he parked outside his house four doors down from mine.
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Easy to see you live in a tightly-knit community where everybody knows everybody else!
No Neighbourhood Watch then?
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This thread reminded me that I hadn't used my horn since I tested it just to make sure it worked in the first week I got the car over 3 years ago. Yep, it's still OK.
--
L\'escargot.
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Maybe, but you have four horns of your own. Some of us have to make do with two.
}:---)
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Some think the horn should go, others that we should keep it.
Maybe a compromise would work: legislate that all horns should emit a recording of Kenneth Williams saying "You are awful" in his most camp voice. That way it could still serve the purpose of giving a warning but not used to bully anyone. Obvously, futher research might be required to perfect the idea.
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>Kenneth Williams saying "You are awful"
Wasn't that Dick Emery? Although he'd do just as well. You might have Kenneth Williams say "Aww, don't be like that."
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I hope no one will mind if I post this short (and unpublished) piece written some years ago, which I have just located on the old computer. It touches on several themes already mentioned here, and one or two others... if cut-and-paste with old stuff gets on people's nerves, say so please.
BACK WHERE IT BELONGS
The Audi I drove over Christmas and the New Year was pleasant, safe, comfortable and stress-free, but the best thing about it was its steering wheel, a three-spoke "sports" item listed as an extra costing more than £250; and the best thing about the steering wheel was its firmly sprung round central horn button, decorated with the intersecting chrome rings of the Auto Union logo.
For people of my generation this is the preferred place for the horn even if, being British, we sound the thing only rarely and with discretion. We may dream sometimes of hauling like American truckers on a bit of string hanging through a hole in the roof from an externally-mounted ship's foghorn, but our natural audible-warning movement is a brief, more or less controlled pounding on the end of the steering column (observation of small children will confirm that this gesture of frustration or excitement has its roots in the earliest stages of psychomotor development).
When I was young, most British steering wheels were three-spoked and made of a bakelite-like black or mud-coloured plastic. They bore at their boss a plain, smooth horn button. Expensive British and all American cars had horns which sang a chord: paaarp. Cheap vehicles bleated thinly: beep beep. I have never heard a proper exhaust whistle from the heroic Edwardian days, but a few ageing exotica sported klaxons, piercing air horns or devices like the supplementary horn on the 20/25 Rolls-Royce limousine my father owned in the late 1950s. The rubber bulb made rather a blot on the walnut veneer facia to the right of the wheel and (being obsolete when the car was made in the early 1930s) had probably been specified by its original owner, an eminent surgeon. Evidently intended for slow, close-quarters work with nervous pedestrians, it choked into silence when treated roughly, but if given the right sort of diffident shove emitted a sound like a large ruminant discreetly passing wind.
I was puzzled by the pleasure the Audi's horn gave me until I realised I had not used a central horn button for years. The ornate, decadent American horn ring arrived here in the nineteen-fifties, eventually mutating into a bit of bright trim along the two spokes steering wheels tended to have in the sixties. But in the name of safety, styling departments were already making a virtue of withdrawing the end of the steering column further and further from the driver's chest and padding it with thick, squashy plastic foam. This banished the horn control to the burgeoning thicket of stalks behind the wheel. For the last couple of decades, people driving unfamiliar vehicles have been patting cautiously at the ends of these bits of wire with variable results: flailing wipers, random headlamp signals, distracting floods of none-too-accurate computer data, the alarming surge of a cruise control, a cracked chime followed by a dalek's voice offering unwanted advice.
The resulting uncertainty and the unpleasant feel of most stalk controls has strengthened my inhibition against using the horn, and caused delay when a warning was needed in a hurry. After the years of confusion I kept forgetting where the Audi's horn was, and I only heard its voice three or four times in the fortnight I had the car: a warm, tuneful chord in keeping with the car's ladylike character, very different from the yobbish, overbearing bawl of a Mercedes. Now that all cars have collapsible steering columns, will the steering wheel boss and central horn button make a comeback? Probably not, owing to the advance of the driver's airbag, whose container inflates the boss into a hideous shapeless object like a week-old drowned sheep, and the wheel itself into a bloated disc with a few mean slots round the edge.
Apart from the Rolls I have only driven one car equipped with two separate horns: Rico Osei's Volkswagen K70. The Ghanaian economy was in crisis in 1977 and the country's currency was inflating dramatically, the cedi (so to speak) at its very seediest. But Rico's K70 - a relation of the NSU RO80 and short-lived predecessor of the Passat, to which it was superior in almost every way - was in impeccable condition and, even more unusually for a non-military vehicle in West Africa, in perfect tune despite its two fat twin-choke sidedraught carburettors. It was comfortable, brisk and firm-handling but could also be driven easily at the very low speeds dictated by the ambling pedestrian crowds found in African cities. Rico was sometimes kind enough to let me drive it around Accra.
Hanging from the underside of its facia on two wires was an object like a bell-push which, when operated, caused the opening bars of La Cucaracha to be played very loudly by a device under the bonnet. It was the Accra equivalent of the Roller's bulb horn, designed to inform girls that you were waiting impatiently outside their houses and give the passers-by a good laugh. Nosing along a side-road one evening, I incautiously sounded this horn as we passed a lady carrying on her head a glass food cabinet packed with empty jars. A scream and crash of breaking glass followed: the lady, evidently absorbed in her private thoughts, had been so startled by the fine old Mexican marching tune that she had thrown her burden aside in preparation for flight. Fortunately nobody was hurt and Ghanaian mobs are relatively kind-hearted. I was not lynched, but a few banknotes changed hands amid gales of indulgent laughter.
ends
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>> Apart from the Rolls I have only driven one car equipped with two separate horns:
Not one to miss a chance to mention the Citroen DS 23 from the '70s that had headlamp flash, electric and air horns on the same stalk. Push for a flash; pull for an electric beep and pull harder for an air blast.
My late mum's Mercedes 280CE had a rocker switch on the dash to select "town" or "country" horns from the horn button on the wheel.
Nice post, Lud btw.
Hawkeye
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Stranger in a strange land
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I think you're right: "You are awful, but I like you." was the catchphrase of Dick Emery's "Mandy", the rampant blonde, but I think I remember it from Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey too.
"Don't be like that" I like and maybe "Don't be rotten" would work. Something the Transport Research Laboratory should get onto right away. Maybe a poll?
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From: www.teletronic.co.uk/dickemery.htm
Interviewer: Now here comes a charming young lady.
Mandy: Hello
Interviewer: Tell me, are you impressed by aristocratic titles?
Mandy: Oh, no. I speak my mind, no matter who I'm talking to.
Interviewer: I see, you mean you wouldn't let anyone take advantage of you?
Mandy: Pardon?
Interviewer: I mean, you wouldn't take things lying down, even from a duke?
Mandy: Ooh, you are awful...but I like you!
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The Horn is a good thing, it lets people let of steam and acts like a warning.
The warning issue is covered above in some detail
The steam issue has been not been fully discussed. The horn is a device for self expression on the road. As some people correctly point out any form of self expression has its down sides. For example if you 'beep' at someone they could get wound up and an accident would occure, in much the same way as a flash of the headlights or a hand gesture would have the same outcomes. It is therefore clear that self expression on the road does lead to conflict and collision.
However how many times have people expressed themself by 'beeping' out of anger, and nothing else happens, other than making the 'beepee' feel beter, and chastising the person being 'beeped' at. The chastised does have a bad day, but probably will think twice about causing anyone else stress on the road by their original action/Inaction. By the same token if we take case of the person who beeped out of anger, they now feel calmer. This will probably make them good choices whilst driving and help prevent an acident.
This is a perswuasive argument since men and women drive at roughly the same speed on roads but women have more low speed acidents, whilst men have more high speed ones. The hypothsised cause is that men take more risks and are generaly more agressive drivers but prehapps have the capcity (due to their better spacial awareness) to make better decisions than women drivers. Its the mens agression that makes them a liability on the road.
Personally I would rather more 'beeping' rather than more head-on crashes.
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Torque means nothing without RPM
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All cars I have ever owned have had dual-tone horns. A light push gives a tiny "peep" as a thank you, a proper push gives the full double-note blast. Isn't that normal?
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CP - news to me.
Lud - What other masterpieces have you got on you old pc?
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CP - news to me.
Well, all my Volvos have done that, and living in an area of narrow roads with passing places most other people seem to be able to give gentle toots as thanks for pulling in. Horns take a high current, especially to get started, so if one only lightly makes electrical contact the diaphram just does a light warble. Perhaps it doesn't work with horns wired through relays?
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I have posted here before to say that we joke with the kids that wife's Clio's horn emits a gentle "would you ever so kindly excuse me" pip where as the Mondeo is not so polite, it's "get out of the way or else" two tone parp, the latter can so easily be misconstrued,
Perhaps it would be useful to have a choice of tones.
On the other hand if the Mondeo's alarm goes off it is nothing more than "parp", "parp", "parp" from the horn where as the Clio has a klaxon that would do the Longships Light proud.
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A light push gives a tiny "peep" as a thank you, a proper push gives the full double-note blast. Isn't that normal?
On my Vectra-C it's all or nothing. It's not possible to give a tiny peep from the horn.
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"Personally I would rather more 'beeping' rather than more head-on crashes"
I was just watching an old lady who must have been 118, possibly the oldest woman in mainland Europe, trying to make it over a pedestrian crossing before the lights changed. She got about halfway, the lights went green and some nice chap whom she'd kept waiting in his car leaned on the horn until she'd gone just far enough for him to squeeze through.
"The chastised... ...will think twice about causing anyone else stress on the road" - Indeed, I hope she learned a valuable lesson.
Personally I would rather have more head-on crashes than 'beeping' for people like this, preferably with a large tree.
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I have a Clio, the faint horn sound that it emits frustrates the hell of of me and makes my friends laugh! GRRRRR
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Torque means nothing without RPM
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I was just watching an old lady who must have been 118, possibly the oldest woman in mainland Europe, trying to make it over a pedestrian crossing before the lights changed. She got about halfway, the lights went green and some nice chap whom she'd kept waiting in his car leaned on the horn until she'd gone just far enough for him to squeeze through.
Probably turned 119 half way across and he was just wishing her happy birthday!
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...some nice chap whom she'd kept waiting in his car leaned on the horn until she'd gone just far enough for him to squeeze through.
Clearly the guy hasn't seen this, then:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZy105010SI
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