For a month I had been driving my car without the horn. It happened accidentally. My car horn stopped working and I just kept postponing getting it fixed. A couple of weeks later I was asking myself: why do I need one?
I’m not a honking enthusiast; I use the horn sparingly. But I did not think I could do away with it. I drive mostly in Delhi that has 7.5 million vehicles and one of the highest accident rates in the country. On my way to office, from Indirapuram in Ghaziabad to Tughlaqabad Institutional Area in Delhi, I pass through several traffic bottlenecks (the Khoda stretch of NH-24,
Ashram, Modi Mill flyover) and the congested locality of Govindpuri, where rickshaws, three-wheelers, pedestrians, buses, wheelbarrows, cars and cows all share the same lane. What if someone suddenly comes in front of you? What if a car comes too close to you? The answer is you use brakes and maintain a distance from those driving recklessly. That’s what I’d do even when my car horn was functioning. Then why did I think I could not do away with the horn? Probably because all cars come with one.
I just do not get the logic of honking. When everyone on the road is blowing the horn, no one pays attention to it. If you drive slow you can rely on your reflexes to avert any accident. If you drive fast then by the time you alert anyone by blowing the horn you would have done the damage. Good brakes and an alert mind avoid accidents, not honking.
Good drivers don’t need a horn
I thought I was drawing broad conclusions from my limited experience, so I asked my colleague in the air pollution unit (they deal a lot with transport) if there were studies on honking in Delhi. The answer was an expected “no”. I googled, and I came across William Phelps Eno, the “Father of traffic safety”. In the first half of the 20th century he had designed traffic plans for London, Paris and New York. An American with a very European penchant for order, he was responsible for several innovations in road safety and regulations, all that we now count as the basics of traffic planning. So how did the Father of traffic safety view horn honking? In the 1930s, Eno campaigned relentlessly against tooting. He believed good drivers don’t need a horn. Mussolini listened to him. So did Paris, London, several other European cities and finally New York by forbidding sound signal in parts of the city. According to his observation, suppression of motor horns did not increase accidents, but reduced them. “It has made drivers more careful and pedestrians more considerate,” Eno wrote.
