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Here’s a little something I’ll be keeping an eye on:  Japanese insurance company Aioi has started to offer pay-by-the-mile car insurance. (See page 2 of this pdf.)  This is an especially nifty development, since it means that Aioi will be working out some kinks in the technology (the company will verify mileage with a device installed in policyholders’ cars) which might help PAYD make the leap across the Pacific. As...

The city council of Vancouver, BC, unanimously passed a resolution on Wednesday, asking the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia—the Crown corporation that provides most car insurance in the province—to introduce pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) insurance. PAYD insurance is a powerful way to improve transportation, save lives and money, and reduce energy use and air pollution. The Provincereports. Some of the reader responses to this article are negative. PAYD guru Todd Litman of...

Cascadia’s guru on pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) auto insurance and related transportation pricing innovations is Todd Litman of the Victoria Tranport Policy Institute. He provides a useful summary of who’s doing PAYD in his newsletter, which I’ll simply insert below the fold. The growth of PAYD programs is very encouraging, because PAYD is among the most powerful incentives for sound transportation and land-use patterns. There are rumors that a Cascadia locale could...

Mixed news for those of us who have been longing for a real low-mileage discount on our auto insurance: A new analysis of the prospects for pay-as-you-drive vehicle insurance (PAYD) concludes that it’s about three years away from broad implementation. The analysis cites a number of barriers for adoption by insurance companies—such as launch costs, the issue of privacy violations, and patent fees—but concludes that consumer interest, potential cost savings,...

For a while now, Northwest transportation experts and advocates have promoted pay-as-you-drive-insurance (PAYD), one of the most promising market approaches to reducing driving. We’re getting closer-Oregon passed a bill encouraging insurers to offer PAYD last year-but it hasn’t yet accelerated from “cool idea” into implementation. But it has in other places. As reported by Victoria Transport Policy Institute‘s Todd Litman, the latest is Dutch insurer Polis Direct, which announced this...

The Aviva Canada insurance company is launching a 5,000-person test of Pay-as-You-Drive (PAYD) insurance in Ontario. Aviva is using a similar approach—plus technology licensed to it by-Progressive Insurance. Progressive is running a pilot of its own in Minnesota, as we noted in August. Aviva’s Press Release says: The program allows drivers to track their driving habits—how much, where and how fast they drive—through a device installed in the vehicle. The...

One of our supporters recently wrote us with an excellent question about Pay-As-You-Drive car insurance (PAYD), a new approach to insurance that rewards motorists for driving less (see previous posts): “How will PAYD affect people in small communities, especially those without public transportation?” PAYD was designed to give drivers more control over their insurance rates AND provide an incentive to drive less, thereby mitigating the negative impacts of driving: climate...

If you drive 10,000 miles a year, aren’t you less likely to have an accident than someone who drives 30,000 miles a year? And if so, shouldn’t you pay less for insurance? That’s the idea behind pay-as-you-drive car insurance (PAYD), an approach that would make buying car insurance more like buying gasoline: the less you drive, the less you pay. But despite studies indicating that mileage-based insurance makes sense from...

Here’s something definitely worth watching: the UK is considering a massive pilot project to make drivers pay to use the roads.  And not just on a few selected highways—the system would effectively turn every street and highway in Great Britain into a toll road. (Here’s a link—but the article is subscription only.  Sorry.)  Tolls would vary based on the kind of road, the number of miles driven, and the time...