Car alarms don't raise an eyebrow

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HUE BUT NO CRY: A UK survey has shown that few people react when a car alarm is triggered.

LONDON - Britons have become so used to the sound of car alarms that four out of five people fail to acknowledge the noise.

According to a new study, reported in the London Daily Mail, only 17% of people walking past a car with its alarm sounding reacted to the siren. But even then, nobody actually DID anything. Their only response was a brief glance.

Of the people who did acknowledge the alert, their only response was to briefly glance at the car as they walked past.

Dr Ian Walker, a lecturer in traffic and transport psychology at England's University of Bath, said: "We learn to ignore any sound that isn’t followed by a meaningful event. We hear car alarms but never see a car being stolen afterwards so do not associate the sound with theft.

"Alarms are only significant to the owner of the car. They may feel the fact they disturb everybody else is a fair price to pay, given how highly most people value their cars."

For the experiment, by insurance company Aviva, alarms were set off in London, Cardiff, Glasgow and Manchester and the response of pedestrians was monitored. People from Cardiff were the most responsive - 25% acknowledging it. Glaswegians were the least responsive at only nine percent.

Mike Day, 29, an office worker from London, said: "If I hear an alarm I never go to check it. They go off at the slightest thing so you know it won’t be genuine.

"It’s become such a common sound I think people tend to block it out, like traffic or aircraft noise."