I had two cars on my insurance. I deleted neither and added a brand new car

Theory 1: Those with spare cars tend to wreck less often than single-car owners.

Theory 2: Volvo owners tend to wreck less often, no matter whether they have a second car or not.

Theory 3: Rates are determined first from your primary car (presumably, the Volvo) and then tweaked for your secondary car. After all, you can only drive one car at a time, and you'll mostly be driving the primary car.

At the point that you sell the BMW, you'll get to test these theories. If your rates go up, then theory 1 might be true. If your rates don't change, then theory 2 might hold. If your rates go down, then theory 3 might rule the day.

I think Theory 3 is at least partly correct; but I'm also pretty sure it would depend on whether you're th only driver listed for both cars....

You can add your daughter to your policy for a song in the UK, and yet if she tries to get her own quote as a new driver it's either unobtainable or unaffordable - why?

In the States, adding a new, teen driver to your policy runs your rates way up. My brother-in-law added his 17 year old son last year and trebled his insurance rate. In my nephew's first week with his license, he got in his first wreck (after the insurance had already gone up). And he's a good, responsible kid.

Since teen drivers have disporptionate numbers accidents, I wonder if they give insurance companies the heebie-jeebies or a cash cow...

-jk

I pay about $4,500 per year for auto insurance.

The facts:
Age: 22
Sex: Male
State: NY
Cars: 2
Car1: Saab 9-3 Viggen with good coverage
Car2: Isuzu Trooper with bare-minumum coverage
Points on license: None
Moving Violations: None on current record
Non-moving Violations: 1 (seatbelt)
Accidents on current record: None
10% Insurance reduction course: Taken 5 months ago (I used to pay nearly $6,000)

Insurance sucks.

I pay £530 a year in the UK (with my wife as a second driver).

Age: 32
Wife's age: 43
Sex: Male
Cars: 1 (but access to wife's car)
My car: Mazda MX5 1.8i
Wife's car: Ford Fiesta 1.4
Points on license: None
Points on wife's licence: 3 (recent speeding fine, 70mph in a 60mph limit)
Accidents on current record: None
Accidents on wife's current record: 3 (one her fault, head on crash)

Yet adding my wife to the policy still reduces the premium by 5%, go figure...

P.S. If I ever get round to adding a second car to my fold (either TVR Tuscan or Ultima GTR kit car) then my insurance will probably go up to something over £2,000 a year.

You can try getting a quote from Liberty Mutual. Every couple years I shop around for insurance, and they have been the cheapest for my combination of vitals for the last 7 years. Much cheaper than Gieco, Progressive, and state farm for me anyway.

I think you can do it online, or you can call my agent Pat Tehin at (585) 424-6050 x230 - I dont think he would mind some free advertising. I am no way profiting from this, honest. I think all the insurance companies are crooks!

I used to be covered by Liberty Mutual under my father's policy. It is likely I would not go back to them because their agents (at least the office in New City, NY) are total lazy bastards. I would have to hound them constantly to get things done.

I have progressive now and it is like night and day. If I want a car on my policy, someone always answers the phone and does it right away. Taking cars off is just as easy. Just fax over the receipt the DMV gives you after surrendering your plate. It gets taken care of without talking to anyone. Excellent service.

Agreed about the agents (Pat included). But, I thought that was an industry wide problem.

I have the same problem with insurance brokers in the UK. I have tried using a broker a couple of times instead of going direct. The same thing happened both times:

- first year, got a good quote from the broker (but then only a few pounds better than my renewal from previous insurer)
- renewal notice comes through in the second year, 10-15% higher than the year before
- I get pissed and contact a few insurers direct, get a better quote than last year's broker's permium
- because I'm pissed at the broker screwing me over I don't contact him and just take the lower direct quote
- broker phones me later and asks why I didn't renew with him
- I say "Because you were too expensive" and say how much I paid direct
- broker says "Well, we could have beaten that if you had told us"
- I say "Well why didn't you quote me a lower figure in the first place"

As far as I can see insurance brokers are useless.

The're using laser in Oregon now.

Yep. Bummer, man. I didn't think Oregone did data-sharing with California, though. Do they?

Returning from Boston, I had a discussion with a very nice RCMP gent in one of the flatter western provinces -- something about 136 in a 110. Very interesting, Coming in the opposite direction, he pulled out from behind an uphill semi and shot me as I (traveling downhill) hit the brakes. He then drove across the deep grass median and hit the lights. No mistaking his interest. Wellll, was I ever glad that I broke down recently and blew a whole $9 on WA vanity HAM plates. I got out of our meeting with a QSL card (written on a RCMP warning).

He was driving a little Chevy, and no sign that I could see of his gear, 'tho I will say it seemed pretty accurate.

Good news for some folks that there are not so many police out there.

Very interesting story.

Too bad I didn't get nailed by a nice one. There was absolutely no chance with this guy, and trust me, I tried. He was very officious, with a total "stick up his butt" attitude. He looked, spoke, and acted like someone who was a cop only because the USMC special forces was full-up on the week that he applied.

In addition to the fact that it was clearly a revenue-generating laser trap, as opposed to someone just driving along patrolling and noticing a speeder. Or as opposed to someone sitting there having a donut and doing the crossword behind a billboard while the continuous-wave radar bleeps occasionally.

See, the thing about laser is that you have to be sitting there, absolutely still, holding the unit in your hand, looking through the viewfinder, actively targeting vehicles' license plates and pulling the trigger. In his case, he was hiding very cleverly (I didn't see him until he dropped in behind me, and I was looking for cops), aiming his little laser gun and clicking the trigger looking for the "big score".

So if they're using the laser gun, then they really mean it.

On the way back a couple days later, I saw the same cop, in the same spot, with someone else pulled over. He was simply tax collecting, I had no chance.

I also saw a motorcycle cop a few miles later with a laser unit in his hand, using his other arm to steady the aim like you would with a pistol. Inside a construction zone of course, because the fines are double in that case.

Is there any place on the web that has a US national click-in database to report where the cops tend to have speed traps? I've got a concept in my head for how I'd handle one, and if no one else has one up, I want to create it. It would be graphically and functionally similar to the USGS earthquake mapping system, except the data would be collected from user reports rather than from automated stations.

Hehe. It's kinda obvious;

www.speedtrap.org

For young people in the UK it pays to drive an unpopular car - eg. VW Golf's and Vauxhall Novas are very expensive, as is any car with an engine > 1.4ish, but Fiats, Volvo's etc cost pretty much the same for a much nicer car.

I found that LHD American imports were no more expensive than a crappy Nova, but much more fun :-) As a young new driver, getting *anything* insured for £600 would have been a challenge let alone an IROC-Z! Ok it's a pain to park, and the local petrol station attendants know me by name but what the hey!

I spoke to somebody recently who was 35 and insured a brand new Corvette Z06 for under £400 ($650) fully comprehensive!

Gareth

In the UK you also get the oddity where small secondhand cars can often cost more than the next size car up does secondhand. I'm told that this is because the smaller secondhand cars are in more demand because there are lots of first time drivers queuing up to buy them and they neither want (or could afford the insurance) on larger cars.

Hehe. It's kinda obvious;
www.speedtrap.org

Argh, they're doing it all wrong. It's just freaking lists you have to sift through. That's useless.

What it needs is a map that graphically shows how recent the activity was recorded and the frequency of the activity, like this.

Well, then you're not duplicating anyone's efforts. Go do it right.

But they've already got the good URL.

How about www.effin-cops.org?

Yeah, when I drove to orgeon this summer one of the people I visited warned me about how evil they can be. Apperently they're known for sitting with thier laser gun underneath the hood of a car which appears to have broken down at the side of the road. Also, having out of state plates means that you won't show up in court AND they're getting money from thos damn californians who keep moving up there and raising housing prices.

Matthew

LOL

You should do it Tony, I'm sure people would use it if it was easy enough to understand. The only question is, can you do your own FAQ?

Also, while you're at it, make it so that we can download the database into our favorite gps program so that it warns us when we are aproaching a speed trap.

I'd expect you could have it running next week in your "copious free time"™

Oh, but of course!

one of the flatter western provinces [...] out there

Out there would be southern Alberta, in the case of this picture, probably somewhere between Lethbridge (where I lived, up to Grade 7), and Pincher Creek. The western provinces only look flat if you grew up around the Rockies. Manitoba is flat. Essex County, in Southern Ontario is FLAT. After living in this latter for 7 years, I assure you, Saskatchewan has hills.

I went on a road trip with a friend of mine, back in about '94. We averaged 140km/h from Winnepeg through to Lethbridge. The great thing about driving there is that people actually check their rearview mirrors, and if they see you coming up behind, will pull over onto the shoulder to let you pass.

(So... how close am I on that picture?)

In Japan, we have a nice carve-up where the government sets insurance rates centrally, and all the companies follow them. So no need to phone around, as the quote will be the same. (Actually, this is starting to crumble a little bit with the advent of foreign owned companies trying to get in to the market, but the majority of people are still on standard rates). However, given that you can still claim for theft even if you left the car unlocked and the keys in the ignition, it's not so bad.

In Hong Kong, there seems to be an undeclared cartel (oops, I mean allegedly), which occasionally decides en masse that certain cars just aren't suitable. So one year, the annual premium for my Moderate European Sports Car went from about $1800 to over $9000. This for a car worth less than $60,000, and me a very safe and careful driver (well, according to their records, anyway). So I had to drop from fully comp to third party only.

Tony, this won't make you feel any better, but there are essentially no speed traps here. (Mostly because there's only about one road where you can break the limit anyway).

Regards

Mark

I've thought a fair bit about speedtrap registries, with my own history of getting speeding tickets, and I'm convinced they're useless. What's to stop the cops from adding a ton of false positives to the database? Even if the data is good, it's still worthless.

Real world example: I can detail for you all the places on I-10, near my house, where I've seen radar or laser speed traps. If you add them all together, it says you just can't speed there at all. I-10, for a few miles anyway, is five lanes wide in each direction, so traffic naturally speeds up there, and that's where the cops hang out. Given that warning, would you drive (a) the 60mph posted speed limit, (b) the 75-80mph flow of traffic, or (c) the 90mph that you can do quite safely when it's not rush hour?

What we really need is real-time surveillance of speed traps. I was driving in Munich, and my passenger (a native German) was translating the radio for me. After the usual weather and traffic reports, they were happily saying where the photo radar traps were located that day. Give me that, and I'll tune to your radio station in a flash. Even better, let's get satellite surveillance. Why should the Feds have all the fun to themselves? Modern high-resolution satellites should be good enough to identify the locations of police cars. I'll pay $10/month for them to beam that data to an in-car GPS navigation system.

Out there would be southern Alberta, in the case of this picture, probably somewhere between Lethbridge (where I lived, up to Grade 7), and Pincher Creek. The western provinces only look flat if you grew up around the Rockies. Manitoba is flat. Essex County, in Southern Ontario is FLAT. After living in this latter for 7 years, I assure you, Saskatchewan has hills.

I am guilty, perhaps, of conflating my RCMP experience with that picture....which I *found* on the Internet....yes, I remember now, I found it on the 'Net!!

I hesitate to risk identification of the RCMP HAM, but I have to agree. Saskatchewan has some rolling hills.

I went on a road trip with a friend of mine, back in about '94. We averaged 140km/h from Winnepeg through to Lethbridge. The great thing about driving there is that people actually check their rearview mirrors, and if they see you coming up behind, will pull over onto the shoulder to let you pass.

Yes, rear-view consciousness and passing behavior improved (on average) dramatically once I got out of Oregon/Washington. Not perfect, but much better. I generally try to make sure I don't have more than a 5-10 MPH differential when passing. If you keep to that -- slow down a bit to avoid inducing heart attacks -- folks on the plains don't seem to get their nose out of joint.

(So... how close am I on that picture?)

Like I say, I found that picture on the Internet, so I can't be 100 percent sure, but from the looks of it my guess is that you are pretty close --- but the road signs in that pic don't look like they are written in Canadian. So I'd guess somewhere just south of Southern Alberta. Looks like somebody trying to calibrate/verify their outboard odo.

(edit: Boy did I misspell Saskatchewan....again!)

I've thought a fair bit about speedtrap registries, with my own history of getting speeding tickets, and I'm convinced they're useless. What's to stop the cops from adding a ton of false positives to the database?

Good point, and I thought a lot about that before even saying anything here.

First of all, false entries in the database are a problem regardless of who's putting them in there. Whether it's cops or script kiddies with nothing better to do, false data is definitely an issue.

There are some things that can help work around this...

- If the database is popular enough and has enough entries, and if the method for graphing the data is done well, the good data will overwhelm the bad data. On a properly designed map, the bad data would look like faint noise compared to the good data.

- To prevent a concerted effort to overwhelm the system with focused non-noisy bad data, authentication methods would be used that identified each user submitting data. In much the same way that other online services with lots of users try to prevent people from creating a bunch of accounts using automation. Then, each user would be limited to reporting a certain number of speed traps in a given time period, so that a single user can't fill up the system with his own reports.

Given that warning, would you drive (a) the 60mph posted speed limit, (b) the 75-80mph flow of traffic, or (c) the 90mph that you can do quite safely when it's not rush hour?

Up to you. The important thing is that that section of road would be shown as a "hot spot" on the graph. If time-of-day really is a factor, that could possibly also be indicated somehow on the graph, for instance with a different type of color.

You should also include a TOS that explicitly prohibits the posting of falsefied data. Log IPs, require a valid email for signup etc. Use some weak encryption (ROT13) on the database, so that a valid login is required. (Make the DMCA work for you!) Heck, if you so wanted, you could explicitly prohibit access to any law enforcement officials. (Whilst this probably wouldn't actually stop them reading the site, it would give them a big disincentive to post false information - to do so would be tantamount to admitting cracking into your system.)

Hmm... maybe false entries by law enforcement officers could be construed as entrapment. Any lawyers in the house?