No, according to a commentary in the Dallas Morning News. Here is a brief excerpt:
In theory, the horn is a safety device; it might rightly be called the world’s first “collision-avoidance system.” But exactly how many collisions it serves to avoid has never been clear.
From its earliest days, some observers wondered whether the horn wasn’t actually facilitating certain road mishaps by shifting the burden of evasion from the honker to the honkee.
A Londoner argued this case in a 1912 letter to The Times: “Drivers have escaped punishment because they hooted loudly just before killing an aged and deaf colonel, or an elderly woman, deaf and blind of one eye, or capsizing another car and injuring three or four persons. … Ordinary care and precaution would have prevented each of such accidents. Hooting, however, is counted a sufficient set-off against the lack of such care and precaution.”
