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.
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.
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.
Speed limits dont decrease acidents. They are the most famous example of a safety feature not working
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