Car Insurance Incentivizes Driving
The ‘pay by the mile driven’ car insurance (wiki) talk has been around for a while, but I don’t think I actually bothered to read an article. I hate cars. I just want them all to either be: a) crushed and have all the parts recycled for something useful - like bikes, or b) crushed.
Then I saw this study on how a ‘TravelCard’ can incentivize people to use public transit more. Then I got angry when I thought of the absurdity of having to wait fifteen years for our own version of a TravelCard. Then I thought about how good car-sharing services like ZipCar seem to be at disincentivizing driving. And that finally led me to take another look at that pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) thing.
It could be an idea that has some legs.
As a side note, I’ve always thought that us online types can use some of our screen real estate to passively push some of the corporate competitors to the truly evil corporate entities. For instance, I’m involved with a couple of small sites and we throw up some ads for Streetsblog or various charities, but we also run free ads for Better World Club, an alternative to the often-evil AAA. Not everyone is car free yet, and we may still have friends and/or family who drive (they’re old-fashioned, but we still love them), so they might like to hear about a slightly less evil way to have guaranteed roadside assistance.
[Image: Flickr/xdjio]
…Changed ‘compacted’ to ‘crushed’ in the original paragraph.
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