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Thursday, April 10, 2008
What drives you to honk?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“I couldn’t believe it,” my daughter exclaimed. “This lady - she was about your age - cut me off and almost hit me. I honked the horn, and she flipped me off.”
Uh-oh, I thought. My daughter had honked the horn!
It was as if she told me she had tried out four-wheeling — without a helmet. (Oh, wait, she told me that, too.) Obviously I have failed to teach her some things in her 23 years.
Honking the horn doesn’t mesh with being polite and courteous, unless of course it is a friendly, goodbye honk as you wave to relatives standing on the porch.
Even the quick “excuse me” honk given to someone who sits through an entire traffic-light cycle can come off as rude.
More importantly, honking can be dangerous business — a lesson I learned decades ago when a woman almost drove into me in a shopping center parking lot on Pleasant Hill Road. I honked and slammed on brakes. She stopped in front of my car, got out, came back, shouted and beat on my window. I’ll never forget her eyes. When I drove away, she followed me through three parking lots. It was the Christmas season.
That was before “road rage” regularly made headlines.
Over the years, I have used my horn rarely (though I admit to straying maybe once or twice when the provocation was egregious). I’ve even cringed when nearby motorists emitted blasts that I feared could be mistakenly credited to me.
My daughter’s tale led me to wonder: what are the laws and etiquette for horn honking. When should you — and when should you not — honk?
Cpl. Rob Rude, public information officer for Gwinnett County Police, said the law only allows drivers to sound the horn when it is “reasonably necessary to ensure safe operation” of the vehicle. (OCGA 40-8-70).
“In other words, you can’t honk on the horn because you are mad at someone,” he said.
Rude acknowledged that police rarely issue citations for horn blowing, but they can.
Intense horn blowing also could fall under the “aggressive driving” law (OCGA 40-6-397), which says - among other things - that a driver cannot intentionally “annoy, harass … intimidate …” other drivers, said Detective Cpl. Tim Colgan of the Snellville Police Department. Colgan teaches driver’s education classes at New London School of Driving in Loganville.
Colgan, who was a patrol officer for 12 years and has been a detective for eight, said he’s never cited anyone for misuse of their horn. “I think an officer would have to witness it,” he said.
Alan Deighton, president of New London School of Driving, said his school teaches its students that horns can be dangerous because of the violent nature of drivers today.
“We tell them that you don’t ever know if the person may explode,” Deighton said. “We’ve seen it with our student driver cars - someone will come up and act outrageous behind them. We’ve even had soccer moms with all their stickers on the SUV and their kids in the car come up and honk the horn and give the finger. It’s unbelievable. So we tell our students to use the horn only when necessary. Otherwise, they should take a long breath and let it go.”
Do you honk? When?
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