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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...

Some more interesting vehicle news, this time on car sharing companies, which according to The New York Times are catching on a bit in Europe: Studies suggest that one shared car replaces 4 to 10 private cars, as people sell their old vehicles…The result is a 30 to 45 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled for each new customer. Now, 30 to 45 percent is a pretty sizeable decline in...

So what, exactly, do nuns drive?  Don’t search for the punchline; it’s an important question raised by Governing Magazine‘s Alan Ehrenhalt in his recent, useful recap of Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking: How many parking spaces should a convent be legally required to provide? If you immediately answered “zero,” then you probably have some common sense. Parking at a convent shouldn’t be a zoning question. Shoup condemns...

Feeling guilty about driving your car? If you’ve been ranting at too many of Clark’srecentposts, then I’ve got a sales pitch for you… For the low, low price of $160 you can turn your Hummer H2 into a zero emissions vehicle. It’s easy. All you need is a TerraPass. Now here’s the fine print: it won’t actually reduce the emissions from your tailpipe, or turn your gas-guzzler into a sipper....

A concerned reader is in the market for a used car, and wants to know what we’d recommend: a fuel-efficient hybrid vehicle (like a Prius), or one that can run on veggie-oil-based biodiesel (like a Volkswagen Jetta)? A while back I posted on a similar question—whether to buy a new Prius or an old Accord.  There, the price differences were so wide that the Accord seemed the better buy—provided that...

A good article in today’s Oregonian about some aggressive conservation measures that Portland General Electric is pursuing. PGE is already a national leader in customers who purchase green power, but the utility is looking to further boost its renewable energy portfolio. The basic idea is simple: for a few extra dollars a month, utility customers can sign up for a program that buys renewable energy—wind, geothermal, and low-impact hydro. The...

More from the impossible-is-catching-on-department. San Francisco is studying the idea of charging motorists fees—often called congestion pricing–for driving on some of its most-congested roads at peak hours.  The city has been inspired in part by London’s successful example, which mayor Ken Livingstone, in town for World Environment Day, has been talking up: Congestion has decreased some 30 percent—or 50,000 cars—in central London since pricing was implemented two years ago. (Many...

I’ve written a coupletimes about ways that drivers can offset their global warming emissions by buying carbon credits—usually by paying for renewable electricity projects.  For folks who can’t afford a Prius (and even for folks who can) this seems to me to be a pretty good way to reduce some of the pollution impacts of your driving habits. Alert reader Dave Manelski from Earth Share of Washington pointed out this...

It’s a rare treat to read a dry, technical report and—almost by accident—learn something surprising, counterintuitive, useful and (at least to me) genuinely new.  Which is exactly what happened when I read this paper (beware, pdf) by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute.  The upshot:  raising vehicle fuel-economy standards, which always seemed to me like a good idea, may actually be counterproductive, even if they’re truly successful at...

The golden boy of Northwest news reporters, Timothy Egan, ventures to southern California to compose an excellent overview of the US trend toward high-occupant/toll (HOT) lanes in today’s New York Times. (Money quote: The Gubernator says, "Californians can’t get from place to place on little fairy wings.") All across the United States, variable tolls-congestion pricing-are becoming the new conventional wisdom about how to do road expansions. In a few places,...