If you’re not originally from Tennessee, you might find one local custom a little unusual. Traverse the Bote Mountain Tunnel or the Spur Tunnel near the Great Smoky Mountains and you’ll notice that drivers are prone to honking their car horns when passing through. Some motorists going in the opposite direction might even return the honk.
Tunnel honking can also be observed at various tunnels throughout the country. So why do drivers do it?
- Is It Legal to Honk in a Tunnel?
The Origin of Honking in Tunnels
Tunnel honking is a practice dating back to the earliest days of automobiles. According to The Citizen-Times in Asheville, North Carolina, freshly-blasted tunnels through otherwise impassable terrain were often single-lane portals. (Owing to a relative lack of traffic, it didn’t make sense to spend the time or money constructing a two-lane exchange.) Because the tunnels were only wide enough for one vehicle, drivers were required to honk their horns to alert vehicles at the other end of the tunnel that incoming traffic was present. Not honking meant risking a head-on collision.
“To avoid the occurrence of two early vehicles suddenly facing off inside a darkened tunnel, or mountain curve, further complicated by the lack of a reverse gear in early cars, early highway safety rules required the driver to issue ‘an audible warning’ to alert any unseen approaching travelers,” North Carolina Justice Academy training coordinator and instructor Kris Merithew told the paper. “When traveling at 10 miles per hour in an open conveyance, the driver could simply announce his intentions by shouting a warning or use of a rubber-bulbed squeeze horn.”…