This is a repost of my post from r/fuckcars
Horns: loud, disruptive, rude, wake up bby, hey quiet down people are trying to read
Bell’s: polite, delicate, ring ring, refined, happen, excuse me please I am passing through thank you
I do have a car, but I have been considering buying a hand bell so that I can open the window and stick my hand out of the window to ring the bell if I need to.
Bikes can have horns though. Honk Honk
Came in here to say I had a friend who took one of those old ass horns that goes “AAAAAYUUUUUGAAH!” on a bicycle when we were in high school. Was the funniest shit ever. Mostly because he had a whole car battery and some other stuff to make the horn work since he took it out of some old piece of junk on his dad’s property (owned a metal fab shop and had tons of scrap and parts all around). Made it seem like it was a powered bike but it was just for a horn.
Trams can have horns too.
Trams just have a sensible setup: bell for alerting others of your location, horn for AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA GET OUTTA THE WAY AAAAAAAAAAAAA
I do kind of wish trams had actual bells these days, though, instead of speakers playing bell sounds.
Car horns should come with a time limit: you can only use it so much per day. Then people might actually use them correctly. It’s not a rage button. It’s a safety device.
Outside of major US cities, americans mostly don’t seem to use them. I mostly use them when I see someone blowing through a red light or a stop sign to alert other drivers there’s a dangerous asshole coming through. But I’m usually the only one I’ve ever seen doing that.
Drivers are supposed to use horns for emergency signalling such as imminent collision. I always thought it was a failing not to include a bell or something for non-emergency signalling.
There is the problem of escalation, where people might simply ignore the bell, but its availability as an alternative to horn would clarify horn use is an expression of aggression, and willful contribution to noise pollution.
That said, I still think autonomous cars can’t come too soon, even if we should be looking to vastly reduce car traffic with public transit and urban archipelagos.
