BEIJING, Jan. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- Wang Jing, a local high school teacher, was startled from sleep one recent night by the wailing sound of an alarm from a car parked outside her home. She couldn't sleep for hours and felt exhausted the next day.

    She is not alone.

    Many residents of residential quarters, including top-grade ones like the one Wang lives in, are complaining to local authorities about the ever-growing noise pollution.

    With the number of cars in the city on the rise, parking is becoming increasingly difficult.

    Car owners sometimes have to park their cars along paths between buildings or in front of home windows. To protect their cars, people usually install sirens in their cars.

    There are more than 200,000 private cars in the city, 40 percent of which are equipped with sirens.

    "I used to be very angry at the noise. I heard that someone was really irritated and threw a flowerpot onto the car," said one resident who identified herself only as Caroline.

    She quickly added, however, that since she became a car owner herself, she has come to sympathize with drivers who sometimes have to circle a block several times before finding a place to park, and she also installed a siren in her car.

    Real estate management companies are feeling irked by car owners, too. Security guards on night shift are often the first ones to investigate cars whose alarms go off. But more often than not, the alarms go off by mistake.

    "We have no rules or regulations to follow in dealing with disputes over siren noise," said Gao Mingyuan, deputy manager of a real estate management company. "The only thing we could do is try to resolve conflicts through negotiation."

    An auto parts dealer near Nanjing Road W. explained why car sirens don't work well.

    He said sirens themselves are not to blame. Often, he said, auto dealers fail to set the sensitivity of alarms to an appropriate level, thus causing them to go off at unexpected times.

    Car owners have other options to protect their cars. For instance, they can install an electronic lock or buy insurance, industry officials said.

    "Besides installing a siren, I have an electronic lock on my car and I bought an insurance. But it's expensive. It costs more than 4,000 yuan (US$482) every year for insurance alone," said Caroline.

    Some car owners, fed up by malfunctioning or incorrectly set alarms, have removed them altogether to prevent trouble. Enditem

    (Shanghai Daily news)