I notice a lot of drivers slamming on the horn for a few seconds at a time, sometimes repeatedly, often just for minor annoyances.
For example, if the light turns green but I wait a fraction of a second to make sure the cars with the red have stopped, I’ll get a long, angry honk from the car behind me. Sometimes, it’s tough to tell who’s honking or who they’re honking at, so I slow down for a second to make sure I’m not going to hit someone. Is there a right way to honk? Are there any laws against honking out of frustration or to tell somebody off? I find it really upsetting. – Glenn, Edmonton
Honk if you hate honking.
Your horn is there to warn others of dangers on the road, not to tell them you’re mad, police said.
“A horn in a vehicle is to be used for safety, such as warning others of a hazard,” Corporal Troy Savinkoff, an Alberta RCMP spokesman, said in an email. “It is not to be used to vent frustration or interfere with other users of the road."
In Alberta, the law states you can’t use a horn unless you’re “giving notice” to drivers and others on the road and you can’t “make more noise than is reasonably necessary.”
It’s a $155 fine but you could also be charged with stunting (with fines starting at $567) if you’re distracting or startling drivers, cyclists or pedestrians, Savinkoff said.
So, you should be honking to prevent a collision – for instance, if you’re in a car’s blind spot and they’re moving into your lane, he said.
The rules vary by province. Quebec, for instance, also bans unnecessary honking. In British Columbia, there’s not a provincial law around horn use, although some municipalities, including Vancouver, have noise bylaws that include unnecessary honking.
Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act doesn’t specify when you should be honking either, but it does ban excessive vehicle noise, said Sean Shapiro, a road safety consultant and former Toronto traffic cop.
“When you honk to cheer your favourite team or to give someone the finger, you get into the realm of unnecessary noise,” he said. “It’s no different than a noisy exhaust… and it could land you a $110 ticket.”
Tough to enforce?
So, for instance, you shouldn’t be honking outside a building to tell someone inside to hurry up, Shapiro said.
But in some situations on the road, it can be tough for police to prove that your honking is unnecessary, he said.
“If you’re honking because the guy in front of you is using his cell phone, that’s absolutely necessary,” he said. “If you’re honking to say ‘The light has turned green, pay attention,’ that makes sense.”
So, if a car is going 40 kilometres an hour in a 60 kilometre-an-hour zone, for example, it might be reasonable to give them a tap on the horn, Shapiro said.
“But staying behind them and laying on the horn for a kilometre, that would be unnecessary,” Shapiro said, adding that most police forces don’t have enough officers to pull over drivers solely for unnecessary honking. “It’s going to be what’s reasonable for the average person and the average person knows that it’s inappropriate to just hammer down on a horn for an unreasonable amount of time.”
Plus, while it might make sense to honk to let a zoned-out driver know that the light changed a couple of seconds ago, that doesn’t mean you should honk if they’re taking a half-second to make sure it’s safe.
“It’s to communicate with another driver for a purpose,” Shapiro said. “And that purpose shouldn’t be to say ‘screw you.’”
A friendly tap?
If you need to use your horn, consider two or three short honks rather than an extended, seconds-long blast, Corporal Michael McLaughlin, spokesman for B.C. Highway Patrol said in an email.
“Vehicle horns are often interpreted as aggressive and associated with rage, and they can startle people or escalate them to anger,” McLaughlin said. “Consider whether using your horn will make the situation worse or better.”
A “love tap” is less likely to enrage touchy drivers, Shapiro said.
“Start with that and, if you’re going to escalate [to warn them of a dangerous situation] because you’re not getting any response, then a longer honk might be warranted,” he said. “We have vehicles now that are so well-insulated and if they’ve got their music on inside, they may not even hear the warning.”
Still, you should realize that the other driver might not understand why you’re honking.
“It’s not Morse code,” Shapiro said. “Simply making a lot of noise doesn’t really do any good. Once you’ve got their attention, it is effectively screaming at them.”
The Ineos Grenadier SUV may have a solution for this problem of not knowing what a horn means – two horns. The high-riding off-roader has a regular horn in the middle of the steering wheel and a softer, friendlier ‘toot horn’ button to the right. It sounds like the different between saying “hello” versus “get out of my way.”
Honking, even when warranted, has sparked road rage. In 2019, an Edmonton man was convicted of charges including aggravated assault for following a woman home in 2017 and assaulting her with a crowbar after she honked at him for stopping his car in the middle of an intersection.
In a Leger survey commissioned by Rates.ca, a financial comparison site, released last week, 56 per cent of respondents admitted to having road rage. Honking was the most common way drivers showed their anger, followed by flashing high beams and tailgating.
“Whenever you choose to engage someone that way – whether it be honking, yelling, giving them the finger, following too close – you could find someone who is not mentally stable or is in a state of crisis,” Shapiro said. “You might get a dangerous response. That’s just the reality.”
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