'Sweet Spot With Mike Sugerman:' How To Know Who's Honking At You
"Sweet Spot," by Mike Sugerman
NEW YORK (WCBS 880) – As a "street reporter," I'm on the street a lot.
And what I notice most about this urban landscape that we live in is… the constant honking.
"Yeah, they beep like idiots, and I don't know where they're going. It's ridiculous," one woman in Greenwich Village said.
There are a lot of reasons, and I'll never uncover them all. But the best I can do, I figure, covering this urban scene, if I can't understand the "why," maybe the what.
Charlie has been a mechanic pretty much all his live at Parkside Auto in Brooklyn. His dad started the business.
He's my mechanic and the one I turned to for an anthropological look at this urban auditory study.
"The flashier the car, the louder the horn," he tells me. "Mustangs, Camaros, Challengers – they're going to have more deeper, more noticeable tones. So you know OK wow, something big and bag is coming."
So if it's really loud, it's that jerk in the Camaro behind you.
"Typically, when you have an older car, the tones are going to be lower and weaker," Charlie says. "A newer car will have a lot louder and higher pitch."
So that's your quick audio guide book to the auditory urban street scene.
Loud: Probably a muscle car. Lower and weaker: An older one. Newer car: Louder and higher pitched.
Now maybe you can tell who's honking at you.
