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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...

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.)

Individuals and institutions can take simple steps to create compact, complete communities that enable residents to get around without a car and encourage physical activity and connections among neighbors.

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...

Hybrid cars are good for us, right? So policymakers should provide incentives—things like tax breaks, access to HOV lanes, and free parking for hybrid drivers. Well, not so fast, says a great article in today’s Washington Post. [Free registration req’d.] There’s growing reason to believe that those incentives for hybrids will make things worse—actually generating more gasoline use, not less. That’s because many of the incentives confuse the means for...

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...

A promising new development for pay-as-you-drive auto insurance (PAYD): a nascent pilot project in Washington state. King County—leading a coalition of local governments, state agencies, and nonprofit organizations—has won a grant of up to $616,000 from the Washington State Department of Transportation for PAYD. And the county is seeking an additional $1.5 million from the federal Department of Transportation to underwrite a 5,000-car demonstration project. First step: select an insurance...

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...

USA Today gives a nod to the concept of pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) car insurance in an article about how technology is changing insurance pricing. The article reviews pilot projects in Minnesota (Progressive’s Tripsense) and the U.K. (Norwich Union’s PAYD program). Both programs are using GPS and wireless technology to track aspects of participants’ driving—including distance, time of day, and where the vehicle is driven-that affect safety but aren’t usually calculated into insurance...