Flow chart answers the question: Should I honk my car horn?

Inspired by the guy in our alley the other night who was honking maybe 20 feet from where my kid was sleeping, I created this informative decision tree flow chart that is fully comprehensive and covers all potential car horn usage scenarios. This should forever solve the question: Should I honk my car horn?

Car horn honking is another example of how being in a car ruins people's otherwise perfectly functional brains. There is no other situation in which someone would wake or bother an entire neighborhood in order to communicate impatience to a single person. A child screaming in a restaurant because their crayon broke or whatever is completely unconcerned with the impact their screaming is having on other people nearby, but that child's body and brain are rapidly growing, overwhelming them with unfamiliar and powerful emotions that are impossible for them to control. A car horn honker, on the other hand, is a fully-developed human with the capability to refrain from pushing the horn function on their car's steering wheel. A screaming child in a restaurant is behaving in an age-appropriate manor while a horn-honking adult is not.

If a honk is need to avoid a collision or a dangerous situation, of course use the horn. But there is no slight or act of road rudeness that is so egregious that you need to alert an entire neighborhood of people about it. Pressing the horn out of frustration is far more rude than whatever it was that made you mad. They annoyed one person, you annoyed many.

One under-appreciated part of Seattle culture that makes our city so much more pleasant is that Seattleites rarely honk their horns. When some rube does decide to lay on their horn, they are almost certainly met with looks of scorn and disapproval from people on the sidewalk. I've been sitting at Vivace on a busy stretch of Broadway on Capitol Hill with trucks loading and unloading in the middle of the street and people constantly crossing on foot mid-block and buses going by and people parking, and I have heard maybe three horn toots in an hour. I love this about our city. Noise pollution has real health consequences, and horn honking accomplishes so little in exchange for all the problems and discomfort it causes. If everyone on Broadway honked every time another road user got in their way or didn't move as quickly as they liked, it would be cacophony here. Instead, it's lovely.

I meant it when I wrote a 2016 Valentine to Seattle drivers saying, We here at Seattle Bike Blog wouldn't trade you for drivers from any other American city." Sure, everyone has had bad interactions with individuals, but the general culture of driving here is so much more careful than other U.S. cities. Folks show up with an aggressive driving style they learned somewhere else, honking gratuitously or accelerating and braking hard at every stop sign or traffic signal, but the city's usually wears them down and takes their edge off. Eventually a Seattle driver must learn that they'll get there when they get there, and they'll have a better time doing it if they aren't trying to shave every possible second off every journey. This calmer driving culture is one reason Seattle has some of the safest streets of any major U.S. city.

Seattle's calmer car culture is worth defending. So keep giving those disapproving glares whenever someone honks their horn in a neighborhood. You're making our city a better place.