Moreover, a blaring alarm might scare off a first-time joyrider, but they’re a non-issue for most professional thieves, who can clip a few wires and silence an alarm with ease. Indeed, one 1997 analysis found that cars with alarms “show no overall reduction in theft losses.”

Worse, car alarms may be affecting the health of the people around them when they go off. A report from Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle-advocacy organization, estimated that New York’s car alarms lead to about $400 to $500 million per year in “public-health costs, lost productivity, decreased property value, and diminished quality of life.” An estimate from an organization whose stated goal is “to reclaim New York City's streets from the automobile” should be taken with a grain of salt, but the point still stands that car-alarm sounds are stress-inducing and sleep-interrupting.

So if car alarms don’t work, how did they become ubiquitous in the first place? While the first car alarm was developed about a century ago and more or less resembles the alarms still in use today, the technology didn’t become truly widespread until the ‘60s and ‘70s, a time when, according to Phillips, neighbors might have been more likely to come to the aid of a besieged vehicle. Over time, though, people grew to ignore them, especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when urban crime rates increased and even more drivers started installing them. From around that time, there is even an account of a thief using a siren to cover up the sound of a car’s windows getting shattered. Nowadays, the streets are still teeming with older cars whose loud, obnoxious anti-theft measures reflect the eras during which they were built.

Today, very few cars roll out of factories equipped with car alarms. For example, a spokesperson for Toyota, currently the world’s largest automaker, says that alarms are not standard in their cars. (Currently, the federal government doesn’t require carmakers to take many anti-theft precautions, other than mandating that they differentiate the key combinations for different vehicles and mark various parts of their cars with vehicle identification numbers.)

That said, many drivers today still elect to purchase car alarms separately from aftermarket vendors, so they are not exactly dying off. Further, one of the car-security experts I spoke to told me that most alarms are purchased aftermarket, only to email me shortly afterward saying that he actually wasn’t sure if they were being installed in factories—demonstrating a confusion about alarms’ provenance that does not bode well for ridding the world of them.

Another thing keeping them around is that they’re cheap. At their cheapest they cost about $20 to $30, which is far less expensive than the more-sophisticated immobilization systems that are built into most cars today. Those can cost around $500, and make sure that the engine won’t start unless a vehicle’s key is inserted. (Digital chips are embedded into these keys, which is why many car keys are so expensive to replace.)