Somewhere, I saw the proposal that honking should be required to be as loud inside the car as outside it, which provides a non-monetary disincentive.

Now that's a good idea. Just adjust the required loudness level to be the same as max(inside of average car right next to you, open street 10m from you), otherwise the extremely low sound could disorient you.

>big east coast city

You mean Boston?

Oh my I'm sure glad you can't pass such a dictatorial law [1]. By directly charging people for using a safety mechanism that they bought with their car, you are incentivizing people to reduce the physical safety of others around them.

You really want that average American, with less than $400 in savings, to think twice about honking and potentially saving someone's life by warning them of danger? It's not even about actually saving $5, it's about the length of time it takes to think about it. Even if you decide not to save the $5 and go for it, honk! you may have delayed so long that someone is now dead that could have been saved.

> If you really need to honk, you'll happily pay $5 for the ability.

This is very definitely not true and an incredible danger to society. Please reconsider the unintended consequences of charging poor people to maintain other people's physical safety on the roads and sidewalks.

[1] And I think this is a wonderful example of why all dictatorships are bad, especially those run by people who think they know all the solutions already.

The point is to make them think twice about the DISTINCTION between honking to save somebody's life and honking to express their own annoyance or frustration.

(I think the idea of tying the could level inside the car to outside is better, but that you are missing the point)

I would put like four figures into a kickstarter if somebody would make some kind of solar-panel+webcam+18650+microphones+arduino kit that can be strapped to every telephone pole and traffic light that just feeds back data on what license plates honk when and where to a public dataset.

Welcome to Shanghai, we have it, provided by the government. 5 years ago it was such a cacophony, then they passed the law forbidding honking, and now cars just flash their lights like crazy. Scooters still honk though, but since they're all EV and otherwise pretty quiet, it's a reasonable enough tradeoff.

Russia also has regulations forbidding the honking within cities except for signaling immediate danger, and it seems to work well, somebody would honk for no good reason sometimes, but the fellow drivers wouldn't approve of it. The lack of automatic enforcement allows to use it sparingly to e.g. wake up somebody at the traffic light and not worry about protesting the fines.