[Amukherjea]

Personal experience from Thiruvanantapuram when it was still Trivundram. I had to travel airport to Kovalam and vice versa at least twice a week.
Within one or two weeks, realised that the drivers took pleasure in honking and mostly in tune with what ever song he was humming!
I started offering them 20Rs extra if he did not honk.
It worked!!! As the drivers forgot once in a while he would bite his tongue and smile sheepishly. We always reached on time and lessons learnt was that sometimes incentives also work.
What can I say.. one does not have retaliate just because some one else is noisy.

[NomadSK]

In my personal capacity, what I have observed about honking is, that it is directly proportional to the mode of driving habits/behaviour one observes on the roads.

Unless People start abiding by the rules and regulations to the core (lane driving, speed limits, sudden maneuvers, shortcuts etc), Honking menace will prevail. Outside India Honking is rarely heard and it generally means "You Lunatic" and it is very distasteful.

Personally, over a period of time, I have left honking even when driving in India, It needs just a bit of more patience and empathy for the other road users.

[montsa007]

Altough I do not know how to drive as of now, have been travelling in the backseat often lately. Even when we are about 50-70 meters away from the signal with plenty of vehicles ahead of us, the moment it turns green everybody starts honking expecting the cars ahead of them to magically disappear, sometimes they start honking when the timer reaches 10 seconds before going to green.

Sadly there is no law to curb the menace, to top it off have seen 2 wheelers equipped with horns which are equivalent to a truck, modified ofcourse.

It all comes down to sensible driving habits, patience & understanding honking won't make a difference (Unless there's someone or something coming on the road and you want to alert them of your presence)

[shankar.balan]

Just thought of this. It may be true.
In our traffic laden cities the lights take time to change.
And even after they change there are always stragglers crossing the signal.
Nowadays with visibly excessive phone addiction it is very possible that many drivers while waiting at the signal are fiddling with whatsapp and email and all.
So they may not notice the light changing.
This may inevitably cause a paroxysm of honking from all the vehicles behind. Also considering the extreme paucity of the quality of patience in today’s fast paced frenetic stressful world.

[Nikhil Beke]

Saw this today in a Chandigarh cab.

[Dr.Procastinate]

Well, the most far-reaching solution is to educate people on road manners but it will take quite some time and patient for the changes to be evident on the road.

In the short term, we can have something like an adaptive limiter which modulates the dB and the max. no. of times you honk within a specific timeframe (eg: 3 continuous honks and horn goes offline for 30 secs).....Well it is all just wishful thinking

[wheelspinner]

Implement a honk limiter like speed limiter. Like 10 honks in 10 minute or so. Problem solved.

Anyways, the smarter people will mess around and bypass it.

[jomyboy]

I am one of those guys who constantly honks while driving; it comes naturally now. My Maruti Swift horn stopped working one fine day and I realised I just couldn't drive. I can't overtake without honking because I have been through close shaves where the driver ahead wasn't looking at his mirrors. At busy roads in Mumbai, half the people are busy on the phones while waking on the road, some walk two abreast, heck at other times you have people walking three abreast. Mumbai is one place where nobody uses the pavements and to top that you have parents/pet owners walking while their lil ones/animals on the outside lolloping close to the vehicles. Honking was forced upon me, now there is no going back!

[am1m]

Spent a week in Vietnam. Hanoi in particular reminds you of Bangalore- roads aren't great in some parts of town (though nowhere near as pot-holed as ours), dust, metro construction, littered, crowded, polluted, narrow roads, chaotic traffic at several places, people jumping lights, going the wrong way, no helmets.

But one major difference - hardly anyone honks! Even when a pedestrian crosses at random, the bikes and cars slow down instead of honking like maniacs. And that makes a world of difference. Traffic moves along at the same pace, irrespective of honking or not. I wonder when that simple, obvious fact will dawn on our roads.

[alpha1]

How about a specification dictating the OEMs that horns need to be series two-way: if you one presses the horn button, the external horns blows ... but so does its brother which is sitting next to the driver's ear on B pillar!

Let see how many drivers will honk then.

[m8002?]

Originally Posted by alpha1

How about a specification dictating the OEMs that horns need to be series two-way: if you one presses the horn button, the external horns blows ... but so does its brother which is sitting next to the driver's ear on B pillar!

Let see how many drivers will honk then.

All that it takes is 2 minutes to cut the wire to the horn inside. I am sure all dealers will offer that as part of the PDI.
We are a country where people were using fake seat belt clips for driver to disable the warning

[madhavgpai]

Originally Posted by dass

Another option is to link it to the fuel consumption, again needs to be across manufacturers. Every press of a horn, somehow needs to consume some amount of fuel, and that will surely get people to think twice before pressing on that horn. Fines, harder to press or access all have workarounds to be avoided. Nothing else, probably will ever work except for a generational shift, that might happen 2 or 3 generations later.

Our regulations are outdated as of today. There's lot of groundwork to be done. Somewhere we need good ideas to reduce honking.

[vinu_h]

The apt I live in is near a junction and the road bends a bit, so users love to honk. We worked with local traffic police to identify unnecessary honking, turns out, the govt has not equipped them with decibel meters. We offered to sponsor a few, but, they turned us down. We put a poster requesting users not to honk and it worked for a few days, but, miscreants took it down when it started raining and used it as a rain coat.

I would love to respond to horns like Jim does.