If you’ve ever visited India, you’ll know driving in its cities can be a chaotic affair – with a cacophony of car horns as drivers attempt to navigate its busy streets.
Now Mumbai police has hit the mute button on noisy drivers – hooking up its traffic lights to decibel meters. If the horns are too loud, the meter resets and the impatient drivers must wait longer.
You can check out a video of the prank here.
As you can see, even with signs saying, ‘Honk more, wait more’ (pictured), it takes a while for the drivers to catch on – but when they do, they seem to learn their lesson.
“This is what we wanted to tell them: Honking or making noise doesn’t move the traffic,” Pranaya Ashok, a Mumbai police spokesman, said. “The traffic takes its own time to move, O.K.?”
While the exercise was just a trial, the police are now looking at whether the system could be installed across the city – with other cities also interested.
Sounds like there’ll be no more ‘honky ponky’.