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Comment by Blikkentrekker | Hacker News Reader

I assume this a local cultural problem.

I do not believe I have ever heard an actual car alarm go off in my life, I have only seen on television, typically in Anglo-Saxon media.

So is this truly as common as the article suggests in some places?

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Since I've lived in US cities, yes. Almost daily do I hear a car alarm.

Probably just a factor of:

1. More cars around me in the city than in the small town I came from.

2. More things that can set off the alarms (loud motorcycles being a big one).

Density too. I reckon there are about 200 to 300 cars in the parking garage for my apartment building. You're bound to hear one with so many cars in one place.

I had no idea.

How do people sleep then, if this is so common?

People in dense cities learn to deal with it one way or another. Somewhere like Manhattan, I can practically guarantee you there are going to be sirens (which are probably even louder) during a given night as well.

Boston does this better, where if there isn't traffic, sirens aren't run. At night, sirens are relatively rare. Especially compared to Seattle and Boise where I've also lived.

In Germany, I only ever heard a couple sirens the whole time I lived there, and none directly on my street.

Yes, come to think of it, I have never heard sirens of emergency services drive near at night, but I have occasionally heard them during the day.

How odd. — I rather value my sleep.

I live in Berlin in an area that has many parking cars. I rarely hear an alarm go off. Maybe 2-3 times a year, if at all. I also only know this from anglo-saxony media.

Car alarms seem very rare in some countries. On VWs used car portal in Austria out of 670 VW Passat only 22 have a car alarm. I never had a car with an alarm and never saw a reason to get one.

It’s common enough that mocking birds routinely learn to imitate the sound of common car alarm sequences. It is certainly a public nuisance, but it is not uncommon to hear a car alarm going off in the middle of the night in most American Cities.

It does seem like a piece of security theater that gets put on by the dealer to make people feel safe about making a large purchase. I don’t think they really do much for safety. In San Francisco (my home) we have a ludicrously high incidence of people joy-bashing car windows. The car alarms just make it more annoying for everyone else. A few weeks ago I saw someone stealing a car while the alarm was going off. The alarm didn’t stop them, but at least it made it easy to report them to the police.

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