When the dude is walking across a 3 way 45MPH in each direction street in a low light situation. Then 1 block away was a well lit cross walk. Yeah he gets the horn. Sorry if I did not make that clear. Did not think I had to... Oh that happened to me just last week. Although I am not sure why you think it is OK for that 1 dude to hold up about 40 other people.
isoskeles|6 years ago
That's not what horns are for. You seem to think it's a punitive device, and I certainly would interpret it similarly to you aiming the muzzle of a gun at my chest.
Granted, I'll agree that's a dumb situation to cross the street, but your actions make it even worse.
To be clear, I mean that if everyone did what you do, going around rationalizing how people "get the horn" when they upset you rather than when your car is in legitimate imminent danger of a collision, we're mainly accomplishing two things:
1. Making driving more aggressive as a whole, associating all these little driving interactions with BLARING CAR HORN SOUNDS
2. Cheapening the meaning of the car horn for when it actually matters
The horn isn't a tool for letting out your aggression. Try screaming obscenities loudly in your car or something else fun like that.
Karrot_Kream|6 years ago
> Although I am not sure why you think it is OK for that 1 dude to hold up about 40 other people
This is a perfect illustration of the US's driving-first culture. Let's do some math here. 40 people / 1.7 people per car average [1] = ~23.529 or 24 cars (which may be the case if it's rush hour, but probably not if it's not). If this is a 3 way intersection, and each of the cars is evenly distributed between directions (which I realize is incorrect, of course), then there are ~7.843 or 8 cars per side. Assuming an (informally weighted) average car size of 174 in. per car [2], with 2 ft of distance between each car, then the block length is a minimum of 1406 ft. Given that the average person walks at 4.6 ft/s [3], this distance would take 5.09 min. to traverse, just to get to your well lit next block. The average US commute is 26.1 min [4], which means just getting to the next block to cross at the well lit intersection would be 1/5 of the average commute, let alone the time most people are willing to tolerate to go to the grocery or pharmacy.
Obviously there are a lot of assumptions in this calculation, but it really goes a long way to showing how little American car-first culture thinks of pedestrian infrastructure, attractiveness, and travel times. "Just" walking over to the next, well-lit block, immediately makes a pedestrian trip for chores non-viable for anyone that values their time. To me, there also seems an in-built disdain for the time and safety of the pedestrian, and those attitudes do nothing but make it more difficult for Americans to do anything without their cars.
[1]: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/tpm/guidance/avo_factors.pdf
[2]: https://www.reference.com/world-view/average-length-car-2e85...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_walking_speed
[4]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/study-states-with-the-longes...