Does anyone actually get ticketed for honking in New York City?

By Jeanine Botta, MPH, Co-founder, The Quiet Coalition

Photo credit: Mikołaj Kołodziejczyk

In a recent Jalopnik article, reporter B. L. Johnson asks whether drivers actually receive tickets for nonemergency horn honking in New York City. Readers can deduce the answer based on the hint of pessimism in the title, and Johnson is right when he says drivers’ odds for receiving a ticket for honking are low. One reason is that police who issue summonses for illegal honking have to be able to state in court that they saw the driver’s hand press the horn, a circumstance that doesn’t often happen.

Johnson cites two programs that have each shown promise as a means of reducing horn honking in New York City. One of these is a noise camera pilot started in 2021 involving cameras that photograph a car’s license when activated by a sound of at least 85 decibels from a given vehicle, resulting in a summons being mailed to the vehicle owner.

The other program is congestion pricing, a tolling system for cars that enter what is known as the Congestion Relief Zone, the area in Manhattan below 60th Street. After the program started in January 2025, New York City’s 311 system received nearly 70% fewer complaints about horn honking from within the Congestion Relief Zone over just two months.

While each of these programs has proven potential, implementing them so that they can improve quality of life for more New Yorkers will require significant financial investment. The noise camera program will need more cameras and more rotating locations. The congestion pricing program will need to be replicated in locations with similar levels of illegal horn use where a tolling system would be unlikely to work. Part of the reason congestion pricing works is that there are few alternative choices for drivers to reach the Congestion Relief Zone in Manhattan, and more ways to reach destinations with similar levels of illegal horn use in the other four boroughs and upper Manhattan. Success would require finding other means to reduce traffic.

Most illegal horn honking seems to occur in traffic, although there are other kinds of use throughout all boroughs, at all times of the day and night, including drivers honking to announce their presence to somebody inside a building. There are also neighborhoods where commuter van drivers announce their presence and availability to pedestrians by sounding high pitched air horns that can be heard from blocks away. I have asked commuter van drivers if they know that this kind of honking is illegal, and some believe that it is not illegal anymore because Don’t Honk signs have been taken down.

And there are cities around the world where this problem does not exist, but they aren’t easy to find.

Some accounts of New York City horn honking give the impression that the law is routinely enforced, without interviewing New Yorkers to find out how well enforcement is going. A good way to find places where honking is minimal is to ask others what they’ve found in their travels. After I began paying more attention to horn honking, I found there to be little to no illegal horn honking in Minneapolis, where I walked for hours, and Clearwater, where I could barely believe the first few times drivers behind me didn’t honk when I lost track of red lights turning green.

Reducing nonemergency horn honking from New York City’s soundscape would be challenging and complex. An important component of any such effort would be to resume the use of signs, and to create a robust educational program that might include public service announcements on radio and television about traffic noise.

A 2013 radio program about the removal of Don’t Honk signs has humorous tones that we might not hear today because we know more about the effects of traffic noise on health than we used to. Among those on the program, the late noise expert and our dear colleague Arline Bronzaft said, “If you want the signs just to function as a reminder, that's not wrong. In psychology, they're called prompts. If you're taking it down, then you should take it down because of results that indicate they're not needed.”