Streetsblog New York City

For your weekend amusement, a tutorial on how to take the lane (via an April post on Epic Fail)…

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Lots of forehead-slapping absurdity in this Slate piece by Dave Johns on the history of the car horn. Like many car culture foibles, horn-honking has a long tradition of intractable drawbacks that outweigh any supposed benefits:

In theory, the horn is a safety device; it might rightly be called the world's first "collision-avoidance system." But exactly how many collisions it serves to avoid has never been clear. From its earliest days, some observers wondered whether the horn wasn't actually facilitating certain road mishaps by shifting the burden of evasion from the honker to the honkee...

By the 1930s, this judgment was gaining converts. First Paris and then London outlawed horn-honking at night. In 1935, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia kicked off a nighttime honking ban with a radio address in which he praised the English anti-horn effort: "The results have been so good that there is no demand from any quarter for their return. Automobile accidents, fatalities, and injuries have been reduced to an appreciable extent merely because the campaign against horns there has caused drivers to drive more carefully." He said deaths were down 17 percent and injuries 7 percent since the ban had taken effect.

In related news, aggressively venting frustration does nothing to relieve chronic gridlock.

Fed up with the dysfunction of New York City's streets, people all around the city are picking up video cameras and making their own StreetFilms. The one above is pretty amazing. Unless you like the sound of car horns honking, make sure your volume is turned down before you press "play."

This StreetFilm was produced by Will Sweeney and Kozo Okumura around the palindrome intersection of 37th Ave. and 73rd St. in Jackson Heights, Queens on a Saturday evening at about 6 pm. Will writes:

We put together the video because we wanted to show how visceral the problem is on a daily basis. The problem of traffic congestion has so many side effects that are difficult to communicate in words or still images. Also, most residents would cite noise as the main complaint, particularly horn honking.

Will and Kozo are part of a growing group of neighborhood documentarians who are submitting work to StreetFilms. Last month Brooklynite Doug Gordon shot this video of car traffic illegally entering Prospect Park. Likewise, Ian Dutton of Community Board 2 in Manhattan has been video-taping bike facilities to show the reality of what it takes to get around New York City on a bicycle, at times.

So how about you? It doesn't take much these days. You don't need a great camera, just some patience, steady hand and an idea that you want to communicate. Check out some of our StreetFilm-making tips then send it in to us to post.