Have you ever seen a policeman giving a ticket to someone honking their car horn in a no-honking zone or at 2 am? In all of my 37 years I have seen (and gotten) speeding, parking, j-walking (etc.) tickets switching hands from the policeman’s to the felon’s. Not once have I seen a driver getting a ticket for miss-honking.
Now, this is, my friends - a problem. Not a “challenge”, not an “issue” and certainly not an “opportunity” but one big, annoying problem.
I want to give you now my 2 cents of how to solve this problem, hoping that there are among our faithful readers some officials in the traffic department. And I’m going to use some SIT thinking tools to help me.
First of all, a small confession – I use the SIT method also to solve problems outside work in my daily life (this is the part where everyone at the office should go “we love you Gil…”).
Ok, I’m going to skip over some of the preliminary stages in the SIT process (I’ll explain those another time), and go straight to the part where I applied the SIT tool – in this case Multiplication. Here’s a brief guide to how to apply Multiplication: choose a component from the problem, create copy(ies) of it, make the copy different somehow from the original, add the component to the problem world and see how it solves the problem.
After running through some of the components I got to the car horn itself – here are 2 ideas that I liked:
1. I multiplied the horn but made the second one an air horn (the kind being used in sports) that is in the hands, not of the driver, but the pedestrian. Once a car honks near him, he honks back at the car!
Now, you could say that this idea has a lot of challenges: cost, distribution, having to carry it around, contributing to the overall noise, not to mention the threat to the pedestrian’s health… and you would probably be right. There is no one perfect solution to a problem. My experience shows that in 90% of the time, the complete solution is composed of few good ideas, some are innovative and some are “mainstream”, so that you cover as many aspects of the problem as possible. But this idea has too many challenges even for my liking, and as much as the retaliation feeling can be satisfying, the other side of the scale is still pretty significant. So let’s move to the better solution I found.
2. Still multiplying the horn, this time we make a copy, whose difference is that it honks inside the car at the same time as it honks out! The benefit? A driver will think twice and even three times before honking the horn (especially with kids inside the car).
Again, we have here an idea with a few challenges: enforcing the second horn, increasing the driver’s rage etc. but you must admit, this one is a much more elegant solution. Furthermore, this idea corresponds to one of SIT’s conditions to define an innovative solution – “the problem is the solution”. With a relatively small change (I am sure that the design and production costs are pretty low) we made the horn itself into a device for reducing excessive honking.
And everything, thanks to a little Multiplication, is once again honky dory…
Gil
I can tell you what i actually do …
i hear the car behind me honk and stay still while the light turnes green…he cont to honk badly and i keep on standing still not moving at all…just as the light starts to blink and before changing to red, I speed off, letting “him” or “her” get stuck in the red light behind. a nice gesture is a wide open hand from the window just to say “good bye”…
Zadok
Unfortunately I do not subscribe to your solutions – Gil – nor to your solution Zadok. Both are of the “fight violence with more violence” type. Personally I find the problem terribly annoying. I call these honks “educational” honks. They are not meant to prevent an undesired occurrence (an accident) they are in some cases simple brute punishments that are aimed at another driver – teaching him a lesson.
However, waiting for the light to nearly change is the same sort of violence. Not to mention that it can lead and has led to rode rage, which start with a honk and can end in the mortuary. Using an air horn is just as bad – it is communal punishment hurting you and others more than the driver at the insulated car. My 2 cents are different. I don’t have a solution to the problem but it helps me to clarify my motivations in wanting to retaliate. I now know that I cannot “educate” these brutes. I cannot fight them. I can only try not to do as they do (which is why I’ll never subscribe to your solutions) and sometimes it helps to think that maybe they had a bad day or are very late for a doctors appointment or what ever. I know that that is probably not the case but it makes it easier for me to forgive these acts of violence and leave the rage behind me.
Shahar,
The discussion and the issues you are raising here are the kind that we meet on daily basis when facilitating our innovation projects. when novel ideas are generated, we get mixed reactions to them in the room. some, like Zadok’s is taking the situation to the extreme while others like you are quick to dismiss. this is usually a sign that we have something interesting in the idea.
There is a reason why cars don’t have an inward horn today. This reason could be that it is a dumb idea or maybe the engineers take the honking for granted or just because they haven’t used the right tools to come up with such an idea. Noise is becoming one of the leading pollutions in our world and as the sustainability awareness grows all over the world, maybe, in 5 years from now, inward-car-horns will be a must just like seat belts or catalytic converters…
Gil
Hi Gil,
Many thanks for your interesting post and for your great ideas. I really liked the second idea but I think it needs to be further developed. Maybe the inward horn could start producing sound only after 3 consecutive seconds of honking and it will increasingly get louder (just like the alarm clock)? In this way only the drivers who misuse the honking will be “punished”, and the “punishment” will increase with time (little sins lead to little punishment, great sins to greater punishment).
interesting…
while we are at it, let’s include an electric shock for the accelerator pedal activated by those who floor it so as to prevent speeding.
like you said, if inward horns were made, it would only increase the rage of the driver, or he’d just disable it anyway.
IMHO, a better way to cut the incessant honking would simply be to disallow the honk to sustain for more than 2 seconds. The driver would need to let the horn ‘rest’ for 20 seconds* before the next activation, so if he’s using it to express rage, it won’t work out that well.
* or more… the more furious the horn tapping, the longer he’d have to wait.
What if a gadget was programmed to debit some amount of money every time that driver’s rage is detected (horn, speed, brisk driving, etc) and it accumulates yearly? Let’s say that the government arranges a contract with a private collection company that would lend those gadgets for free to drivers, for a % of the collection business. Let’s say that every year the driver should “discharge” (pay) the gadget’s balance when s/he renews the car’s license. This would not require additional technological ellaboration and it would be
This way the measure would not be passive nor agressive, but preventive and dissuasive. More long term oriented.
Regards,
Fabian.
Its funny how honking horns mean different things in different countries. In Costa Rica, its just a friendly warning, “I’m here”, “coming through”, “careful”. I found it refreshing after the US. Even I use it for “get the hell out of the way!”, which is pretty much the constant for the US. After my visit Costa Rica I now try to avoid using it.