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Speaking of tracking the reasons Puget Sound’s roads and transit package failed—here’s a chance for Puget Sound residents to put in your two cents about the Proposition 1 vote and where to go from here. Take Sound Transit’s survey here:http://www.surveymonkey.com/soundtransit You can let Sound Transit hear your voice on transportation solutions in the region, congestion pricing, the taxes we pay for driving (and the costs we don’t pay), and other...

While we’re on the subject of overlooked academic studies, here’s another goodie (pdf link): an analysis of whether cars pay their own way. The basic question: do taxes paid by drivers equal public spending to support driving? The short answer: Nope! In fact, we’d have to raise gas taxes by somewhere between 20 to 70 cents per gallon for driving to pay for itself. I’d recommend reading the study itself...

Cascadia’s largest private car insurer—Seattle-based Safeco—has finally announced its first entry into the world of on-board automotive infotech. And it’s not a new insurance plan. It’s a GPS device which, for $15 a month, will notify parents when their teenagers go too fast, too far, or the wrong place. You can now sign up for the service here. If you’re aghast, well, I’m not surprised. It may make teens feel...

I recently moved into a new apartment in classic 1920s building. It’s well maintained, centrally located, and charming. But one of the building’s so-called selling points—it’s even on the manager’s business card—is that “all utilities are included.” Is this really a good idea? And who benefits? “Free” energy probably appears like a huge benefit to renters. But to me it was actually a turn-off. Surely, allowing tenants to gobble up...

Each time I walk to a Flexcar in my neighborhood, I pass scores of parked private cars. I sometimes fantasize about strolling up to one of them, swiping my Flexcard over the dash, and driving away. I’d be debited automatically; my neighbor would be credited, less a slice for Flexcar. And I’d have a vastly larger pool of vehicles at my disposal. This fantasy is less fantastical than it may...

The conventional wisdom is that it’s cheaper to live in the outer suburbs (ie., a long drive from jobs, stores, or schools) than closer to a town or city center. I suppose that’s true enough—if you’re looking only at the cost of housing. But if you live a long way from most of the places you want to go, you wind up driving a lot more. And that, of course,...

Good news. A large car insurer will soon roll out pay-as-you-drive insurance to the whole UK market, says the Times of London. Norwich Union has been road testing the product for two years in a large pilot project. Apparently, PAYD passed the test! (Hat tip to Todd Litman for this news.)

Over at the Harper’s Magazine blog,economist and author Dean Baker discusses pay-as-you-drive car insurance. [T]here is one thing we could do now that would change how people consume gasoline. We could switch from the current way in which people pay for auto insurance to a pay-by-the-mile system. Such a switch might reduce annual gasoline consumption by as much as 10 percent, without raising the cost of insurance for an average...

There’s been a bunchofcommentintheblogosphere today about hiking gas taxes—with the rough consensus that it’s ok environmental policy, tough on the poor, and politically risky (though perhaps not quite as unthinkable as it once was). So it’s interesting to note that Oregon—often considered a policy innovator among US states—is in the middle of an experiment that could eventually lead to a repeal of the state gas tax. Oregon’s transportation department is...

Pay-as-you-drive auto insurance keeps coming closer. There are now at least three different technology companies in the market with pay-as-you-drive systems. These are not yet insurance plans available to Cascadian consumers. They’re products—little electronic gizmos that connect to GPS and/or wireless networks and/or the USB port on your home computer—that insurance companies can adopt to collect data for PAYD insurance plans. Each product is a bit different and each has...