After A While It Just Gets To Your Head

And your loved ones look at you like you’re Richard Dreyfus sculpting mashed potatoes:

Residents of one of the city’s noisiest neighborhoods are honking mad at hacks who lean on their horns — so they’re cooking up creative ways to quiet the nightly cabby cacophony.

The Lower East Side’s Community Board 3, which has registered 6,133 noise complaints since July, the second most in the city, voted last week to ask the Taxi and Limousine Commission to consider installing a light atop taxis that would glow when a cabby beeps the horn.

This would make it easier for cops to ticket the driver for breaking the city’s noise code, which prohibits excessive horn honking.

“Right now, the police actually have to see a cabdriver honk the horn to issue a ticket, and that’s obviously hard,” said Board 3 district manager Susan Stetzer. “This would allow the police to see exactly who honked and make it easy to enforce the rules.”

The board will include the suggested tattletale light in a letter to the TLC, which is soliciting public feedback as it designs the taxi of the future.

But that’s not the only anti-honking measure the community is clamoring for.

Residents want to see cabs equipped with horns that blare as loudly inside the taxi as outside, creating a natural deterrent.

Next on the list: a meter that knocks $1 off the fare every time the horn honks.

“If the driver lost a buck every time he blew the horn, that would stop him real quick,” said Lower East Side resident Avram Fefer, who called the din on Ludlow Street “absolutely horrible.”

“What Times Square is to the eyes, Ludlow Street is to the ears,” he said.

. . .

And if the community’s suggestions fall on deaf ears? “A very vigorous egg-throwing campaign” might be the answer, according to Fefer.

Why not two levels of horns? A quieter one for when someone is right in front of you and a louder one for real danger? Or at least when you’re six cars back and you want to know what the hold up is . . . (seriously, the culture of honking here is absurd!)