[situationista]

I've always observed that in India honking the horn is not just about overtaking - it's an acoustic indicator of your position, making it possible for those in front of you to plot your presence without taking their eyes off the road in front (which usually requires their absolute and undivied attention). Additionally, as the article points out, many vehicles don't possess funtional rear-view mirrors, and are therefore dependent on acoustic signals to know what's going on around them.

[unscaled]

Until you get inside a city traffic jam, and then it becomes an acoustic indicator of something you already know: every square centimeter around you is covered by a car or a motorbike.

I'm a skeptical horns help with anything in modern Indian city traffic, but on the highway they can be quite useful, if annoying, especially on mountainous road when you don't have a good line of sight, but even just on a normal road with drivers who don't look on their rear-view mirrors.

[1_player]

> it's an acoustic indicator of your position, making it possible for those in front of you to plot your presence without taking their eyes off the road in front

So you're saying Indian drivers have developed echo-location.

[jacobolus]

Echo-location is about using reflected sound to detect the position of silent barriers/objects in the vicinity. This is about detecting the position of sound sources, which is something nearly everyone does all the time.

[soledades]

That said, humans are capable of echolocation with practice and it is commonplace in some cultures.