Should Honking Your Horn Be Considered Free Speech?

Aa Freespeechhorns
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I assume all United States Supreme Court Justices, be they active, retired, or dead, are avid Autopian readers. You don’t get to a position like that not reading the Autopian, if you know what I mean. That’s why I was a bit surprised that the Supreme Court recently declined to hear a case about if honking a car horn should be protected speech under the First Amendment. The case had to do with laws that penalize or restrict car horn-honking, and a Californian named Susan Porter was the person who managed to take a horn honking ticket all the way to the Supreme Court, and I gotta say I really respect that unwillingness to pay, what, a $75 fine or so? Hell yeah.

“The car horn is the sound of democracy in action,” is what Porter’s lawyers wrote in their appeal, and I won’t lie: I love that. Personally, I’m inclined to think that car horns are protected speech, since in many ways I think of a car as a prosthetic to the body, where our physical actions are translated and magnified by the machinery of the car. We push a pedal, we move forward. We turn our arms to turn a wheel, the car turns accordingly. And so we smack the center of our steering wheel as we yelp in rage, and the car emits a booming honk in response.

Of course, there are reasons why you might want to restrict honking. It’s annoying, I’m trying to sleep here, and there are safety concerns. Rationally, I guess honking should be limited to situations that demand urgent attention from a driver. This sort of fits with the old “yelling FIRE in a crowded theater” First Amendment restriction argument.

Aa Horn

But, at the same time, walking around in public and yelling “FRANKFURTER” or “AEROLA” or any other random word isn’t illegal, but, sure it is annoying, at least that’s what I’ve been told by those agitated people at that wake.

So, what do we think? Is a car horn just an extension of the driver’s voice, protected by the same First Amendment rights our larynx-produced noises get? Or should a horn’s bleat be restricted to safety uses?

Let’s discuss, in this First Amendment-protected setting, and I’ll allow car horn-generated comments here, too.

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63 thoughts on “Should Honking Your Horn Be Considered Free Speech?”

  2. Slippery slope. So will fart cans and those back up beepers that are meant to warn blind children that are 150 yards away that a vehicle is moving be next?

  3. If you have traveled elsewhere in the world, you will eventually end up in a country that has already traveled down an alternate route in horn usage. In those countries, the horn is already a communication/echolocation device. It is constantly applied and used, as a way to both identify location, intention and movement.

  4. Spare a thought for the wonderful, smiley, exotic country of Thailand, where honking your horn can see you charged with heinous crime of threatening the king or his family, if done at the wrong place/time.
    It sounds crazy, but in Thailand, any kind of statement or action that “defames, insults or threatens the king, queen or regent” can cost you from three to fifteen years of Thai prison. Recently two people were arrested for this terrible crime.
    Honk for freedom, just make sure there’s no insecure royals in the neighbourhood.

  6. I am of the honking is for traffic use only crowd.
    I was on I-35 in Austin during morning rushour exiting the highway to the feeder road once, and someone else decided they didn’t want to wait and just ran their truck up the shoulder of the exit lane so that they didn’t have to sit in traffic. Since I was about to have to cross 4 lanes of feeder road traffic I honked at him because we may have ended up in an accident if he thought I was going straight. They then followed me about 2 miles to my job and proceeded to tell me that the only reason to be honking is if I knew him, or I wanted to fight. After 20 minutes of arguing with this idiot in the parking lot, he realized I wasn’t going to be goaded into a fight and he left. TLDR: Most people don’t understand what horns are for or when to use them.

  7. A MUCH MORE IMPORTANT ISSUE. Why did VW ship Beetles with two, one, and even zero horn openings? And why did Chevrolet discover that their similar opening was degrading the horn and discontinue the slot before shipping the Corvair? These are the type of hard-hitting but trivial journalistic topics we need to discuss!

  8. A lot of use this to warn other drivers of the Idiots on the road, as well as to remind the idiots that they are, well, idiots. I consider this a Journalistic intent, which is free speech,.

  9. On the surface this appears to be a stupid question, but it is interesting if you overthink it. My thought is that, like others have said below, whether honking is speech depends on the context. But it seems like whether honking is speech misses the point.

    The issue here is whether all manners of speech are allowable at all times. In this particular case, the person was honking a horn to support protestors. The first amendment guarantees your ability to support those protestors, but not in any way you see fit (i.e. you can’t fire a gun in the air or set something on fire to show support). If the first amendment allows a government to ban firing a gun in the air as a form of support (which is an inappropriate and potentially dangerous use of a gun), I don’t see why a government can’t restrict honking a horn as a form of support (since honking a horn is abusing a safety device and potentially creating a safety hazard).

    So in my uneducated opinion (I’m not an attorney so I am basically talking out of my ass here) it seems that the first amendment does not give you an inalienable right to honk your car’s horn and it therefore can be banned.

    1. …you can’t fire a gun in the air or set something on fire to show support…

      Not in California, perhaps, but in Texas, hell yeah you can! And you can in Florida too, as long as the protestors are on the same side as the current gubernatorial administration. If not, you have to aim your gun at them instead.

  11. Honking is protected free speech. A lot of honking and headlight flashing cases involve warning of speed traps. The cops don’t like people blowing the gaff on their highway robbery scams.

  12. A horn is ostensibly a safety device, allowing a limited form of communication, not unlike the turn signal. As such, restrictions on its use make sense. I’m a believer in minimizing nonessential use of the horn, if only to keep people from getting complacent about hearing it.

    That said, honking in support of a protest or gathering that is encouraging such seems unlikely to be misconstrued as use to warn another driver they are engaging in dangerous behavior. I would wonder about uneven enforcement of this (Did the cop use it as an excuse to pull a car over because of the driver or the car and some suspicion they couldn’t articulate? Was a particular demonstration targeted for tickets?). If enforcement of this is used to cause problems for a particular group or as an excuse for discriminatory stops, that’s an issue. But that wasn’t the issue brought before the court, so I don’t know if there was evidence for/against this issue.

    I feel similarly about tint laws and a few other things that make sense in theory, but are enforced unevenly in practice. Does that mean we should remove the laws? Stop enforcement? Enforce more (perhaps with additional traffic enforcement officers that are separate from regular cops)? It’s a tricky question.

    Personally, I think the California court was right to throw out the ticket and the Supreme Court was right to decline (the case was moot, since she’d already received the remedy of having the ticket dropped). I also think the laws governing horn use are fine, but enforcement is the sticky issue for reasons other than free speech (though, if enforced for some demonstrations and not others, quite possibly for free speech issues, as well).

  14. Too difficult to regulate or enforce inappropriate versus appropriate use, so we should err on the side of permissible and protect the right. Recall that additional freedoms are rarely granted, and more often restricted over time.

  15. I’d say honking is free speech, with time/location limitations.

    Honking to signal support of the rally on the side of the road while driving by is free speech.

    Honking to piss off your annoying neighbor at 3am isn’t free speech.

    The situations in the middle between those two extremes are a “I’ll know it when I see it” deal.

  16. I almost never use my horn. I work in a rough part of town and the streets are thermonuclear right now. People get shot in road rage incidents in the DC area all the time. It’s not worth rolling the dice. I’ll usually just give my lights a little flash if someone isn’t paying attention and I stare straight ahead at all times.

  17. “My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.”

    I would argue your right to sound your horn ends where my ears begin. A horn is a safety device intended to alert inattentive drivers and pedestrians, not to signal support of political causes. A flare gun and a strobe light placed on a vehicle’s roof are safety devices, too. Strobe lights are regulated and no one argues that putting red and blue strobes on a civilian vehicle is a speech issue.

    In some states, Wisconsin is one IIRC, a driver can be cited for sounding a horn UNLESS they are using their brakes. I think that’s a good rule.

    1. I agree with you on some small level, but your grossly ignoring that the damage a fist inflicts on your nose is very different than a couple of beeps of the horn (or even constant blaring) has on your ears. The severity of negative impact is the underlying basis…

        1. And when you are 20ft away? 50ft? 100ft?

          Stop trying to play it off like it’s remotely equal here. Sure, there are times it could be remotely equal, but those are far and few between. I’ve never heard (hehe) of anyone having long term and lasting effects due to honking. I’ve certainly heard of lasting effects due to getting punched.

  18. I assume all United States Supreme Court Justices, be they active, retired, or dead, are avid Autopian readers.

    But how many Presidents? Taft was clearly an Autopian, having been Chief Justice and President (not simultaneously, for those who are rightfully concerned but completely educated about the workings of US government), but I have to assume at least a fairly high percentage beyond that.

  19. I believe that the SCOTUS has ruled that giving the middle finger is, in fact, protected free speech.

    Therefore, citing bumper stickers that read “Horn broken. Watch for middle finger.” is precedent to establish them as legally the same.

    1. SCOTUS has indeed ruled thusly, but some clarification is necessary.

      The middle finger is protected as free speech if your hand is inside the car when you extend the digit. If your hand is outside the car… I forget the wording, but basically you can be cited for making a bad/misleading traffic signal. This is related to the hand signals people used to use before vehicles were equipped with trafficators or turn signals.

  22. The 1st Amendment was intended to protect your right to have and voice opinions about the government without fear of retaliation from that government. It does not give you the right to say whatever you want whenever you want on whatever social media platform you want.

    1. True, but is “your environment” a “social media platform”? If you own Twitter or Pravda (sorry, that’s “Truth” in English) or “Marxist Leninist Quarterly”, you can allow whatever your heart desires (unless it annoys politicians), I guess in some sense the 100 yards around my car is a “social media platform”, but that’s kind of a stretch.

      1. Nah, I just threw that in there because of the world we live in.
        The yardstick I was always taught was that “the 1st Amendment doesn’t allow you to yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre”. I think this situation falls squarely under this category. If one were honking to make a political statement, like protesting against a white supremacist demonstration, that might be Constitutionally protected. But honking because you feel like letting everyone in your neighborhood know that it’s your birthday is not.

  23. This should just fall into the bucket of “don’t be an asshole”

    Should I be allowed to honk my horn to get someone’s attention? Sure.
    How about a long blast to express my displeasure at someone cutting me off? Probably.
    Should I be allowed to honk my horn as part of a parade of people making noise intentionally through town of flag waving folks upset? No.

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