Car insurance rates are surging as Americans struggle to pay for basic necessities and ongoing debt.
The newest Consumer Price Index shows car insurance spiked 20 percent year over year. The surge in pricing occurred after years of gradual price inflation, with earlier reports finding the rates grew by 36 percent since 2020.
That’s at the same time debt is soaring for many Americans. While Americans hold around 1.75 trillion in student debt loans alone, they also have $1.05 trillion in credit card balances not paid off.
Add inflation and greedflation, and It’s no wonder insurance rates are higher.
I can’t speak for your state, but red light cameras started being a great source of revenue from fines, so people started rigidly adhering to them. So this caused two problems.
While there were less T-bone accidents meaning people running red lights and hitting perpendicular traffic, all other types of accidents increased by 18% because people were hard stopping so as not to get fined and getting rear ended. source. So if your point is lower costs because of fewer accidents, Red light cameras increased accidents.
Because people were not running lights anymore, the fines from red light cameras went down. The money was so good that cities got greedy, they started randomly decreasing yellow light times to cause more people to run red lights to increase fines again video source
Also in my area people started shooting out the redlight cameras cause they were fining people who were following the law to a T. The cops were outright working with the city maintenance guys to cut the wire on the damned things because they were getting pissed having to deal with the complaints.
Red light cameras cause accidents because people slam on their brakes too hard.
Or, someone’s following distance is too short.
Agreed, but defense driving dictates that you should be aware of the tailgating asshole behind you
… and not be speeding in the first place.
None of this is the fault of any enforcement action, it’s the fault of poor driving.
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I’ve seen lights like that before. They were more of a distraction in my opinion. I’ve also seen lights that cycle back from red, attempting to allow people to clear the intersection before being tboned I guess?
Maybe the solution is to instead re-educate everyone on how to drive in such a manner as to consider the traffic behind them.
Which do you think is a costlier and deadlier accident:
The solution to accidents is not “more accidents”
Most of the time, a red light camera causes someone to slam on their brakes to avoid passing through the red light, instead of just going straight through safely.
It happens often when the light changes just before you get to the intersection and you’re going just fast enough that you’d have to slam on your brakes or go through the red light the second after it changes to red. Slamming on your brakes is more dangerous than moving through a clear intersection.
You’re making assumptions here.
Scenario 1: You’re assuming that everyone is observing adequate stopping distance, has working brakes, and is adequately paying attention to slow down.
Scenario 2: You’re assuming that green means it’s safe to go and that the cross traffic light turns green simultaneously with a given light going red.
Let’s address the easy stuff first.
In scenario 2, if my light just turned red that means the opposite light just turned green. This isn’t how stop lights work in practice. Usually, both sides of traffic are stopped momentarily before a light turns green such that traffic in the intersection can clear. Also, if you see a stop light that’s red you are usually slowing down. In other words, right before cross traffic gets a green light they are either stopped or slowing down, assuming they can adequately pay attention.
Cars have mass. You don’t instantaneously go from 0 speed to speed limit. It takes a ramp up time. It is generally low risk to run a stop light immediately following a light change.
Now to address both scenarios, we have to talk about defensive driving.
You forgot the big part
As an example, progressive insurance
It’s more profitable to raise rates, and they can get away with it
Some of these are valid. But speed cameras do fuck all for safety. They are a private company scam to take money from people
The better way to go about it is to redesign roadways to force people to slow down. Narrower lanes, trees on each side, no more 6-lane highways through semi-residential and mixed-use areas. And then invest in public transportation so that fewer people even need to drive their own cars.
But I’m preaching to the choir on Lemmy and hoping for hell to freeze over.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Those first two, the “people” are largely the auto manufacturers.
Smaller and cheaper cars are SUPER popular in the rest of the world and are literally not available at all in the US. The auto mfgs will tell you it is because of US preference, but in a country of 330 million, there doesn’t need to be that much demand compared to these vehicles popularity in, say, a cheese-loving nation of 65 million. Even if they are immensely less popular, there is still MORE than enough market for some of these ALREADY-BEING-PRODUCED vehicles.
But the US auto mfgs refuse. They go bigger and more expensive. The US consumer has no real choice.
For your fourth and fifth, the “people” are US civil/transportation engineers. They must be stopped. They are a scourge. There’s no culture of safe road engineering in the US. AASHTO are an association of insane fuckwits.
I am incredibly skeptical that the behaviors of US drivers are significantly different than anywhere else in the world. I’m pretty skeptical of worries over inspections or licensing requirements and am CERTAIN that additional police enforcement will only cause more mayhem and death and not protect any life. I believe it’s almost entirely a problem of road engineering, urban design, and vehicle design.
Mfgs also don’t produce as many of the base trims so it limits choice further. Then on top of that the dealers tend to mark cars way up. Cars in general are just way overpriced since COVID started and some mfgs are still claiming supply chain issues so they artificially limit supply further.
To the point about manufacturers, it’s also an issue with emissions laws, because smaller cars have more restrictions on emissions. So rather than figure out how to make cars run better, everyone is making bigger vehicles so they fall into a lower emissions requirement classes.
But they do produce smaller cheaper cars that can follow those emissions standards - for markets like Germany or the Netherlands. They just refuse to go through the process of certifying and selling those same vehicles in the US market.
Not to be all tinfoil hat, but I think they have a gentleman’s agreement to just not be competitive like that in the US market because they can get away with it. Because the US consumer is gullible and our Regulators are asleep at the wheel.
It’s not like the average US consumer has a say in this. The cheapest car you can drive off a lot is like 25k now. We could have less expensive cars but for half a century we’ve used tariffs to provide an unfair competitive advantage to our domestic motor companies who only took advantage of it to price gouge.
You’re missing the part where people spend $80k cars on a loan each five years because they are financially illiterate.
Another factor (in the US at least) is over-litigation of any and all traffic incidents. Seems like the default practice now is to get lawyers involved for a fender bender that breaks one tail light. The “at fault” drivers insurance ends up using lawyers to go back and forth haggling with the “victim” drivers lawyers and they finally settle on some ridiculous payment that is 10x what the actual damage was. All that cost gets passed on to everybody who buys car insurance.
Speed limits dont decrease acidents. They are the most famous example of a safety feature not working
If the road is made for 90km/h, wide and with good sight lines, reducing legal speed to 70km/h doesn’t do much. There also needs to be made adjustments to the road so you cannot drive faster than 70km/h. Well so you aren’t natirally incentiviced to drive faster than you should.
Once the state of Montana had no speed limits out side ot towns. When they added speed limits there was no change to traffic accidents or deaths.
We have a lot of roads in the US now with speed limits closer to 105-115km/h. When you get up to this range your vehicles start dropping fuel efficiency too due to loss from wind drag.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2023/07/13/theres-a-trend-to-raise-speed-limits-but-it-increases-risk-of-death-and-serious-injury/
This list is true and depressing. People in this country should not be running it. It’s a daycare run by children.
Electric cars are a contributing factor to both of these trends.
With respect to more expensive cars, people don’t have a choice.
The most sold vehicle in the USA are oversized pick-up …
I’d like to see the figures you’re looking at. SUVs are usually counted as “light trucks”, and manufacturers have killed off a lot of car lines and replaced them with SUVs.
More people are buying electric cars. Electric cars are heavier, and so are electric “light trucks”. More electric cars on the road is going to push the average weight of vehicles on the roads upwards. Heavier cars take farther to stop and they aren’t as nimble. Heavier vehicles are more likely to be involved in an accident, and accidents are going to be more severe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_F-150_Lightning#Overview
https://apnews.com/article/technology-road-safety-national-transportation-board-automotive-accidents-dd5c4260f68e9f5dcb430a02cc939f6b