comparing meteors to stars

Noted a great remark by Phil Plait on his redux article in the Geminid meteor shower.

Meteors are generally not terribly bright.  A few can be blazing, but most are about as bright as your average star...

Well put. I often encourage people to view meteor showers from a dark site.

Plait's helpful statement underlines that if you can only see magnitude 2 or 3 stars from your home location in the city, then you're not going to see many meteors. 

I think that we're trying to say is that the average meteor is similar in brightness to mag 4 or 5 stars... So use that as your threshold for assessing your local light pollution.