My threshold for acceptable honking is:

- Is there danger?
- Is this a public scolding?

It’s permissible, I think, to honk at a city bus driver who clips (say) a red light making a left turn from the center lane, and proceeds to block car traffic in both directions for the next light cycle. People should be shamed, honking is the way to do it in cars.

But it’s tremendously socially disruptive, should really be reserved for traffic sewers, and I’d love to see ticketing for folks who honk when there’s no danger. The cops could enforce it with:

“Why did you honk?”

And if the answer isn’t “I thought this guy was gonna hit me!” then you’d write him up.

The douchebag winner is the pedicab driver for starting the whole thing, for losing the brawl and tossing the can.

Of course, if the pedicab guy had stayed he probably would have been charged for damaging the cab that ran into him.

I would, however, like to point out that if the cyclist felt he was so wronged, why did he not stick around? The cabbie stays and talks to the police. We often complain on here about drivers leaving the scene of an accident or incident, so why let the pedicab driver’s behavior go unmentioned?

So Doug, I felt that honking precisely does NOT “miss the point.”

You yourself tackle the event from a “who started it” point of view, and so was I trying to.

You say the pedicabber started it with his coffee; I say the cabbie started it with his horn. And, maybe without enough explanation, I simply contended that honking like that is a form of assault. I didn’t go so far as to say that it should always be treated as LEGAL, “capital A” Assault (although personally I do think that would be fair).

Let’s forget the question of whether honking is assault. The fact that this causes a debate her shows that the idea won’t have any traction outside of Streetsblog. Regardless of whether honking is assault, we may hurt our cause if we overstate our case.

I myself suffer from horn-induced suicide (a single incident) and have frequently contemplated suicide as a result of it.

Your thoughtless comments anger and upset me. You literally add insult to injury.

I will never hear silence again.

After watching the video several times, it is not clear to me that the driver used his car to strike or assault the pedicab. I think he definitely blocked the path of the pedicab, but I can’t tell if did more than that – reasonbable people could certainly disagree on whether assault charges would be warranted.

The fact is that street space, especially in midtown, is scarce. A majority of this space is used by motor vehicles right now. As cyclists and pedestrians, we should try to change the allocation of space, and we should try to get drivers to share the road with us through legislations, law enforcement, and education. But we also must recognize current realities and ride accordingly.

Regarding the horn honking, sometimes it is an exercise of driver entitlement, but sometimes it is actually well meaning but drivers don’t realize how aggressive it sounds to bikers or pedestrians. Unless you ride in the city and know how it feels to have cars passing you from behind, with little clearance, and honking loudly, you probably don’t realize how nerve-wracking it can be.

If honking at all passes legal muster as assault, I’ll gladly place it there.

Odd that so many of my fellow livable streets advocates seem more interested in making excuses. There’s an old Yiddish saying, loosely translated: “A jerk is a jerk and a mensch is a mensch.” The pedicab driver and the taxi driver are both jerks.

That being said we really need to develop better ways to give feedback to cars about how their actions are improper–but it’s difficult when you are speaking to someone often higher up and enclosed in metal and glass. I’ll give three illustrations from my recent history one, I’m not overly proud of the first the second I’m not sure about, the third was handled well, I believe:

1) I was walking in Foggy Bottom near a gas station and the car comes flying out of the station onto the sidewalk (via curb cut) waiting to make a right hand turn blocking my friend and me off. I spit towards the vehicle in disgust (yes, not overly pleasant, I know… I don’t think I actually hit the car but spitting on sidewalks is bad enough). The driver slams on the brakes and I go to the window and apologize for spitting (realizing I am an idiot and have made the situation worse) but tell him that pedestrians are walking on the sidewalk and he can’t just pull out in front of them and block it. Needless to say it didn’t go well. I walked to his window to apologize and he punched me in the face and then kept on repeating he was going to get out of the car. Lesson: even if you do no damage and don’t even touch the car, don’t lose the upper hand and make things worse. And you put yourself in danger, the punch was light, but I walked behind his car and am probably lucky he didn’t back up into me. And he went from being a reckless driver to a reckless and angry driver.

2) I was in the right hand lane going down L St. in DC and a car behind me starts honking. I turn around and he’s trying to make a right hand turn and wants me to either go onto the sidewalk or into the next lane of traffic so he can make his turn. Annoyed by his honking I stayed there and he kept on honking until the light changed. Lesson: I don’t know. As a biker I try to accommodate cars as much as I can. I don’t _want_ to get in their way I just want to be safe and get to work. Should I have just let him go? Should I have said, “sir, please don’t honk at me, I am doing this legally and I don’t want to block you but please at least get my attention in a less obnoxious fashion”? I am not sure what I should have said.

3) A woman in DuPont circle was pulled onto the P St. bike lane entering the circle. I pulled up next to her, knocked on her window and told her she was in the bike lane as politely as I could. She said “oh, sorry… and I’m lost, how do I find GWU?” I gave her directions and she was on her way, hopefully paying more attention to bike lanes and bikers. Lessons: talk, be nice, hopefully they listen?

Conclusions:

Infrastructure is important. Curb cuts are points of conflict. So is DuPont circle which confuses cars and makes them pay less attention to pedestrians and bikers. On L St. maybe a separated turn lane… but mostly that was not an infrastructure problem.

Talk. Being able to talk to cars is important… too often when you try they speed away. Sometimes you do things out of anger/to get their attention and often those make things worse. But when you have the chance to talk civilly to cars you should. It might help? But also keep your cool, and keeping it when you feel your life is/was just in danger can be difficult but it’s important. None of us want to be the pedicab driver even if he was provoked. But we need ways to fix these conflicts.

So, accepting that honking regulations are not regularly enforced…

A car rides up behind you and honks. You’re on a bike or some other form of pedaled transportation. The car’s driver keeps honking. You have a cup of coffee in your hand — real safe, by the way — and you have two choices:

1. Let the driver pass, even if he keeps honking and yelling at you.
2. Throw your coffee at him.

It’s when you choose option 2 that the honking argument becomes TOTALLY irrelevant. I know we all naturally want to side with the underdog in a situation like this, and most of us identify with the pedicab simply because he’s on a bike-like object, but one act of aggression does not warrant another. If we as a community are seen as excusing someone’s behavior simply because he’s on two wheels — or three — and not four, then we have no moral standing. A little nuance is needed in parsing out this scene, but so is a strict sense of right and wrong.

The pedicab driver should not have thrown his coffee. Period. Who knows what is not shown before the video starts, but that act right there is enough to get most of the Fox 5 watching NYC public on the taxi driver’s side.

While the common definition of an “assault” typically involves some kind physical impact upon the victim, the common-law legal definition of “assault” includes merely putting someone in reasonable apprehension of physical harm without any physical contact. Since it is generally illegal to use a horn except to give a “reasonable warning of danger,” the motorist that honks while tailgating a bicyclist should be interpreted as giving a warning that the motorist is about to run over the bicyclist. The honking puts the bicyclist in reasonable apprehension of physical harm and may (depending upon the jurisdiction) constitutes an assault in the technical legal sense. And putting aside criminal charges, most states (including New York) recognize that causing another person emotional distress by placing them in fear of a physical impact, is a tortious act that can give rise to a civil lawsuit for damages.

And it is hardly far-fetched to imagine abusive and illegal motor vehicle honking at an unshielded traffic participant giving rise to actionable emotional distress. For an unshielded bicyclist or pedestrian to be honked at by a motor vehicle in close proximity is extremely startling and alarming, and causes all the physical symptoms that Marty and dartley talk about above. At a minimum, the bicyclist almost involuntarily looks behind them and may injure themselves by swerving precipitously to avoid the presumed oncoming danger.

Very few motorists understand this. They think nothing of honking at a bicyclist as a means to intimidate them to the margin of the road. I bought myself a speedometer recently to see if this only occurred when I was moving slowly, but I find that it still occurs when I am cruising in the middle of the traffic lane nearest the curb (as is my right to do) at 20+ MPH. The honking starts almost immediately when I attempt to ride in the middle of the traffic lane on one of the Central Park transverse roads, because most motorists feel entitled to ride on these roads well in excess of the 30 MPH limit. Moreover, even apparently well-meaning motorists will honk while passing a bicyclist with plenty of room to spare, because they seem to think they are promoting safety by “advising” the bicyclist of their presence with the horn. Or maybe it is just a way of communicating the view that any time they are motoring past a bicyclist, they are creating a danger that must be warned against by honking the horn.

While attempting legal action in response to the typical honking abuse scenario (a honk or two and the motorist moves on) would be silly, in other scenarios legal action could be perfectly appropriate. Once I faced a motorist who was angry because I wouldn’t exit the traffic lane when he tried to honk me out of it. He changed lanes as if to pass, but then harassed me by riding alongside me while yelling at me and then starting to merge into or directly in front of me, over and over. He never touched me, but this may well have been some form of assault and was certainly unlawful. If the taxi driver in the video clip had closely tailgated and repeatedly honked at the pedicab operator for an extended period, I would put him in the same category. There’s not enough info in this video to determine whether that took place here. (And, even if the taxi driver had done so, that still would not excuse the pedicab operator’s response).

CM Comrie’s speculation that pedicab operators drive recklessly because they view themselves as “wearing a cloak of environmental friendliness” just doesn’t ring true with me. IMO, those pedicab operators that ride recklessly and unpredictably do so for the same reason that some cab drivers are reckless and unpredictable: because they have a financial incentive. If all the pedicab operators saw themselves as some kind of “green brotherhood” on the road as Comrie suggests, they be sporting slogans and/or would show extraordinary courtesy to fellow bicyclists. In my experience this is only rarely the case. Because pedicab operators have a financial incentive to do potentially dangerous things like circling while looking for a potential fare, or suddenly swerving to the curb to pick one up, they should be regulated to require signaling devices and subject to fair but meaningful traffic law enforcement comparable to that applied to taxicabs.