https://abc7.com/post/california-auto-insurance-set-rise-by-54-percent-new-report-says/15190456/
By the end of the year, the typical auto insurance policy in California will reportedly be 54% more expensive than last year.
Report says a large part of it is due to increases in severe weather events due to climate change so I guess you reap what you sow. Still doesn't begin to capture the costs of car usage but at least it's a start. Sucks for lower income people who need a car but we need things like this to push people away from car ownership and onto public transit otherwise the inertia of car dependence will stimy any efforts to improve public transit.
Inb4 "but public transit sucks right now I need a car", yes it does but no politician is going to invest in making it better if everyone's driving. We need to push people onto public transit so they can experience how bad it is and pressure there representatives to improve it. If we don't the status quo will remain, the planet will get warmer, more severe weather events will happen and people will die.
I keep arguing this and people don't like it. The pain is necessary, we need people to be inconvenienced so they demand we solve the problem. Our greatest enemy is little stopgap solutions that kind of help people now at the cost of their future, like subsidizing oil to make gas prices cheaper.
It really sucks that people who are already having a hard time, people who don't have money or time, are going to be the first to feel the pain. There's definitely things we can do to help, but we all know that at least America isn't going to do those things. I just don't see a better way. Kicking the can down the road isn't going to help them either, it's just going to put them in a worse spot later.
wow what a really shitty and uncaring way to look at this good job for your lack of humanity, cunt.
You have to have a pretty limited view of humanity to think this is uncaring. Higher insurance costs and people driving less is mostly just inconvenient for people in rich developed nations. Meanwhile the climate change mostly caused by the excessive pollution of those people is and will cause even more suffering due to severe weather events, drought, famine etc. This will disproportionately effect the most vulnerable people in developing and poor countries which have contributed way less to climate change. Look at a map of per capital emissions then look at one for countries that will suffer the most due to climate change and tell me how that is fair or humane.
But yeah, I'm unsympathetic, go on and tell a person dying of heat in India whose never even driven a car how I'm inhumane for not feeling more sad about you paying more for car insurance, cunt.
How bout the poor people that relay on their cars to live and also have little to begin with. They suffer just as much as any others but go on on your fucking high horse im sure those who live in 3rd world countries really effected by climate change are sooooo thankful they have a shitstain like you cheering for the struggle of other working class individuals, you unemphatic virtue signaling sack of shit. The corporations that actually contribute the majority to climate change sure love shitheads like you.
So much name calling and so little argument. This same "what about the first world working class" argument can be made about ending gas subsidies or adding gas/carbon taxes. It can also be made about increasing labor standards, and thus costs of goods produced, in the third world. "If we don't use sweatshop labor to produce shoes than a working class person in the u.s. might have to pay double for there shoes, and if you don't feel bad for them then your heartless". Not everything that is good for the first world working class is good for the working class as a whole.
The "corporations are actually the problem" argument completely ignores the fact that those corporations are emitting that much to meet western demands for consumption.
The fact remains westerners and Americans especially need to drive way less and consume way less if we want to prevent climate change. That means if your lifestyle relies on driving and consuming that amount you'll need to change your lifestyle. That will be painful, but not as painful as the horrors the people of the third world will suffer if we don't.
Yes because fucking surely having higher insurance to bleed even more money from the working class before implementing proper public transport is surely the right fucking way to go about it. Ill make sure to tell the mother of 3 living out of her camper she should be grateful for what she has because comparatively someone in a third world country has it worse. really love the sweatshop comparison and how it doesnt make any fucking sense to the situation well done fuck face.
If it's not the right way to go about it then how should we do it? Like I said in the beginning no politician is going to advocate for public transit when all there constituency drives, and the only thing that's going to get people to not drive is to add more friction to driving, which will require making drivers lives more difficult.
Also this isn't insurance companies profiteering, they are currently in the red due to increased claims caused by severe weather events from climate change. To lower insurance costs would require subsidies, which we shouldn't be using on a means of transport that is destructive to the environment.
As for the sweatshop argument let me spell it out since you seem a bit dense: the western lifestyle, including the working class, is subsidized by the exploitation of both the working class of the third world as well as the environment. Stopping that exploitation will require increasing the cost of living for westerners. If you stop sweat shop labor that working class mother of 3 will have to pay more for her kids shoes. If you end gas subsidies and add a carbon tax that working class mother of 3 will have to pay more for gas. If you don't subsidize car insurance that mother of 3 will have to pay more for that. All of these would add to the burden of that mother but they will also alleviate the suffering of those in the third world and future generations significantly more. There are also ways to alleviate the burden of the mother too: universal childcare, paid maternity leave, affordable public housing, federal jobs guarantee etc. that don't require incentivizing destructive lifestyles and forms of production.
This is a pretty short article that links to: https://insurify.com/car-insurance/report/ Which has a full report
Wow it's like half the people in California don't have insurance 🤔🤔🤔
Saying this as someone who got in a car accident where 3 other drivers did not have insurance and fucked my life up
Uh, can you explain to a European how does that even work?
They cause lots of financial damages to you and just... not pay? File for bankcruptcy? Or?
Yeah they just disappeared into the woodwork, left me with almost a hundred thousand dollars in medical debt.
It's always a good day when private cars running costs go up, incentives people to drop it if it's not absolutely needed
Edit:
Me: cars bad
Americans:
In a sense that there needs to be a way to show that the status quo of only maintaining/expanding car infrastructure and providing nothing else as viable alternative is a dead one. Ridiculous insurance increases is part of that.
Fixed route and Accessible buses are possible even in smaller cities like Missoula, MT, population 70k, which provides fare-free transit service to its residents. In bigger cities, mass transit, urban and interurban rail needs to be explored and expanded today, else these problems will only get worse with no end in sight.
Cagers are not being punished. They're still not paying the actual cost of car dependency. They're still being subsidized by non-drivers who are actually continuing to be punished.
In my city, if I want to arrive at my office at 8AM, I need to leave my apartment by car at 7:45. If I want to be within a block or so of my office by that same time, I need to leave my apartment at 6:15 to find a bus stop and ride on three different buses. Getting home by bus after ending my shift at 5:30 (I work 9 hour shifts and get every other Friday off), I would get home about 7:15.
Consider that I'm paid roughly $35 an hour pre-tax. If I do this every day for a month, the time this costs me would be equivalent to more than a two week paycheck.
Why would I take the bus?
I have zero interest in riding a bus for the same reason and I'll add that I'd rather not sit in a bus with a bunch of other people. Hard pass.
I'm not afraid of someone doing something to me, I'm more concerned with whatever illness they may have. People are gross, I like my space. You do you and ride a packed a buss full of people with some no doubt sick, and some with terrible hygiene that stink. I'll ride in my luxurious and fast car enjoying my heat and a/c with my heated/ac seats and great sound system.
Car manufacturers have lobbied to make America only accessible by car. As a consequence, you now have no sensible choice but to drive everywhere. Imagine if gas prices were to double tomorrow. What would you do?
And with most other things, you wouldn't just accept it if the price doubled, but with gas, you'd have no choice.
If you have 15min drive to office, that would be ~15-45min with bicycle and save you a good bunch yearly if you want to put it that way
It would take me about 45 minutes one way. It could work, assuming it never rained or snowed (both will absolutely happen here in upstate NY) and my exercise-induced asthma didn't prevent me physically from doing so. Don't get me wrong, I love my ebike for quick zips around town, but it's no replacement for my car at this point. It can't function in the rain or snow and, even if it could, I don't want to risk injuring myself by riding on un-shoveled sidewalks or the slurry of death that accumulates on the sides of the road from the snow plows. Plus I have to keep my work laptop dry, and I'd be much less safe against the US's notoriously brutal cyclist ignorance.
As someone with Excercise-Induced asthma i must ask; Dont you have an emergency inhaler? Also going for walks does gradually build up your endurance, just obviously never overdo it (especially in the winter, you will keel over and simply die).
But, as the future is looking less and less car centric it would be a good idea to start now.
I couldn't do public transit like that. My anxiety wouldn't let me. The amount of sick people crammed into busses and trains like that. It makes me start to panic. Like in Japan where they force you in an over packed train...I get for many people it's NBD but I couldn't do it.
It's amazing how car dependency is so ingrained that leaving a cage induces agoraphobia, anxiety, and related psychological traumas.
Or your square footage could go down. Or instead of moving closer to your job, you could find a different job closer to your home. Point is, you do have options. They might take compromises, but they're there.
You’re asking them to compromise food and shelter so the only point you’re making is that you’re an asshole.
square footage could go down.
Could it though? Don't know if you noticed but the rental market is completely fucked in NA. For most people this would mean renting a room instead of an apartment, which doesn't work well if you for example, are a family of 4.
find a different job closer
There are no guarantees for this because jobs of people's industries which pay them the money they need to support themselves and their families are not geographically distributed evenly. If you have years of tenure at your workplace as well, it is a big fucking risk to change jobs unless you have a really, really, good reason to do so as well.
Point is, you might have these options but it doesn't mean everyone does. People's lives and options are not so black and white as you seem to think.
Who were they trying to blame?? They are just saying for their situation they need a car to survive.
I live two hours into the desert past Battlefield. If I don't have access to a car, I'm not getting to anything, we don't even have a hospital that will do live birth less than an hour away, no neurologists, nothing. We have a rural health clinic that mostly directs people to the ER. If someone really has an emergency they might get a helicopter ride if they're luck. Or they might get to experience a 2hr ambulance ride. Which my wife has done two. Now, I can walk some places in town. But a lot of it isn't even paved, if you see those bicycles with the huge fat wheels, those are pretty great out here actually, lots of sand to get trapped in, not a lot of paved road.
It's not a option, I'm not messing with you, when I was a kid you could actually ride a bus out of town, it drove to the Mojave greyhound stop, which is literally just a parking lot, not an actual building of any kind, but that ended by 2002. There's no options, you car, or walk, or bike, or mad max on a go cart, but the cops WILL pull you over and ticket you, those fuckers have nothing to do and we're so good at hiring LAPD officers that get fired for gross misconduct that we actually shut down our PD for a good 5 years and just asked CHP to come by every few weeks. Our crime rates plummeted. Which I really wish we stuck to that, put PD now seems to only harass people with old cars who aren't white enough.
The state is huge, you're right. It's not just LA and San Francisco. But to anti-car people, there are only five places to live in the US, and if you're not in NYC, SF, LA, Chicago, or DC, you don't exist. Walk everywhere, lose your job, become homeless! That'll get politicians to invest in public transportation!
You are severely harmed by not having a car *and being too apathetic and selfish to do anything about it
Sorted that for you
And there's that ignorant privilege. No one is coming out to Kern County to build stop lights, let alone a some how functioning public transit system, our best bet would be high speed rail out here, and you can thank one individual billionaire for fucking that up. What are we supposed to do? Use our voting power of a low population county to address billionaire's fucking us too hard? I drive my neighbors out of town if they need me to, I do what I can, there's no options, you get access to a car or you die.
I agree with the cost of private cars in the US are detrimentally low. We have insanely subsidized gas, the car owners don't pay for the cost of the roads (see federal gas tax being laughably low), and the side effect health hazards (noise, plastics dust, crash deaths) are considered normal despite the sheer suffering they cause.
That said, making cars more painful (cost/time) must be coupled with the work of rebuilding our infrastructure to modern standards. This means normal frequency mass transit (8 minute or less intervals), separated bike roads, and pedestrian safety put over car speed.
It can be done (there's solutions to all of the superficial emotional jabs people seem to throw online), it just takes work to get our cities back from the clutches of the car only thinking we've been doing for 60+ years.