Motorists blocked from Fifth Avenue for six hours found a workaround: circling the perimeter, honking, forever
MANHATTAN With Summer Streets once again closing a long stretch of Manhattan roadway from the Brooklyn Bridge up to Inwood for a full car-free Saturday, a coalition of frustrated drivers has responded not with a formal complaint, not with a permit application, but with what organizers are calling “The Perimeter,” a slow, deliberate, horn-heavy loop around the closure zone that accomplishes, by every measurable metric, absolutely nothing.
“We’re not trying to stop Summer Streets,” said organizer Vinnie Caruso, idling in traffic three blocks from the nearest closed intersection. “We know it’s not going anywhere. We just need somewhere to put the feeling. The honking isn’t strategy. The honking is grief.”
A Protest With No Demands
Unlike most organized demonstrations, The Perimeter has no stated policy ask, no petition, and no spokesperson willing to articulate what, exactly, victory would look like. Participants simply drive the closure’s outer boundary in slow, honking laps, sometimes for hours, expressing what Caruso describes as “a very New York kind of protest, where the point isn’t winning, the point is being heard, even if nobody who could actually change anything is listening.”
City officials, for their part, note that Summer Streets has run for years with overwhelmingly positive turnout, drawing pedestrians, cyclists, and runners to enjoy open roadway from morning until early afternoon, alongside free fitness classes and cultural programming along the route. A Department of Transportation spokesperson, asked about the honking convoy circling the perimeter, offered a diplomatic non-answer: “We support everyone’s right to experience traffic in the way that speaks to them personally.”
The Physics of Spite
Traffic engineers note that The Perimeter, whatever its emotional value to participants, produces measurably worse congestion on the surrounding streets than the closure itself, since drivers are voluntarily concentrating themselves into a tighter ring around an area they could simply avoid by taking literally any other route through Manhattan. “It’s not rational, traffic-wise,” one engineer said. “But I don’t think rationality was ever really the design goal here.”
Caruso, for his part, rejects the characterization that the protest lacks purpose. “The purpose is the honking,” he said, honking, by way of demonstration. “You feel that? That’s the purpose. Right there.” Asked whether he’d support Summer Streets if it were rescheduled to a day he personally didn’t need to drive anywhere, Caruso admitted, after a long pause, that he “hadn’t really thought about it from that angle,” and that “possibly, in that scenario, yes, I would be fine with it, actually.”
Pedestrians, Meanwhile, Unbothered
Inside the closure zone, the actual Summer Streets participants joggers, cyclists, families with strollers, a noticeably large contingent of people on rollerblades who seem to have been saving them for exactly this occasion report hearing the distant honking only faintly, and treating it, per several attendees, as “basically ambient city noise, like a car alarm you’ve learned to tune out.” One runner, informed that the honking outside represented an organized protest against the very event she was enjoying, appeared genuinely surprised. “I thought that was just, like, Tuesday traffic,” she said. “I didn’t realize it had a name.”
An Annual Tradition, Apparently, Now
With Summer Streets scheduled to continue in Manhattan before concluding in Brooklyn and the Bronx later this month, Caruso says The Perimeter intends to reconvene for each remaining date. “We’ll be back,” he said. “Same time, same honking, same complete lack of any measurable effect on city policy. That’s not defeat. That’s tradition now.”
A Growing, Loosely Organized Membership
What began as a handful of frustrated drivers has, over successive Summer Streets Saturdays, grown into a genuinely recognizable fixture, complete with an informal group chat, a rotating meetup spot near a bagel shop just outside the closure zone, and, as of last week, a small batch of hand-printed bumper stickers reading “I HONKED AND I’M NOT SORRY,” which Caruso reports selling at cost, mostly to recoup printing fees. “We’re not making money off this,” he clarified. “Nobody’s getting rich honking in a circle. This is a not-for-profit operation, emotionally and financially.”
New members reportedly join for reasons only loosely related to Summer Streets itself. One recent addition, a delivery driver who asked not to be identified given his employer’s policies on public demonstrations, said he joined mainly for the camaraderie. “Half of us aren’t even mad about the street closure specifically anymore,” he admitted. “It’s become more like a car club that happens to also be a protest. We talk about our routes, we complain about parking, occasionally somebody honks.”
City Council Notices, Mildly
A city council staffer, speaking on background, confirmed the office has received several constituent emails referencing “the honking thing,” though the staffer noted the emails were difficult to categorize as either complaints or endorsements, since roughly half praised the drivers’ persistence and the other half simply asked, with evident confusion, what exactly was being protested. “We don’t currently have a policy response to a demonstration whose entire message is a car horn,” the staffer said. “I’m not sure what that response would even look like.”
Further coverage of New York’s most circular form of civic engagement continues at bohiney.com, and The London Prat has covered similarly symbolic protest movements across the pond, including a memorable dispute over a roundabout that, coincidentally, also solved nothing.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/