CAUSE FOR ALARM.(The Talk of the Town)

One night a year ago, Aaron Friedman, a twenty-five-year-old classical-music composer and jazz saxophonist, was awakened, as he often had been, by the bleating ostinato of a car alarm. His apartment, in Washington Heights, looked onto a five-way intersection. There was a restaurant downstairs, and a post office and a bodega across the street, and, as a result, so much pedestrian and automobile traffic that the cars parked nearby were constantly being jostled into song. The block, Friedman had come to believe, was car-alarm central.

In a rage, Friedman went online. "I started doing research about car alarms and discovered that they were totally useless in preventing car theft," he said recently. "That's when this really became, you know, a vendetta." In short order, Friedman, who as the son of a Berkeley judge decided long ago to live an apolitical life, became an expert and an activist and, within a year, the citizen spirit behind what could soon be a total ban on car alarms in New York City.

First came the obvious: phone calls to the Mayor's office and the local councilman; a community-board speech. Then Friedman set out to create an alarm-eradication group. He searched the Times archives for people who had written letters to the editor featuring the term "car alarm," and called them on the phone: thirty citizens to the barricades. He also set up a Web site, www.silentmajorityny.org, which features legends (a mockingbird in Brooklyn that sings alarm songs), confessions ("A friend of mine once peed on a car with an alarm going off and I cheered him on"), and instances of wonderment ("I feel like I have road rage and I don't even have a car").

On the basis of Friedman's anti-noise noisemaking, the nonprofit group Transportation Alternatives took him on last winter as a consultant. He helped write the group's report "Alarmingly Useless," which documents the fact that car alarms, as we know them, at least, do not deter theft, though they do harm public health, impede education, and erode urban civility. The report also notes that silent car alarms are effective and available: an "immobilizer" that requires you to have a special key to start the car, a pager that alerts the ...