Accidents caused by distracted driving partly to blame for increase in insurance rates

This seems to the summer of rate increases by insurance companies. I do not think it is anything unusual, but maybe the amount of the increases is just larger than in the recent past. So what is driving the need for rate increases by insurance companies that insure your home and vehicles?

If you look back at history, you can see a direct correlation between miles driven and accident frequency. You can also see the correlation between the price of gas and miles driven. So as the price of gas goes down, miles driven increases and accident frequency increases. That does make sense. What does not make sense is that in this time of reduced gas prices, accident severity has increased. Remember, your insurance company prices its policies based on experience, what has happened, and what they expect to happen in the near future. Since they do not control the economic factors affecting people’s behavior, they can only react to them. This results in overpricing if the price of gas were to double, or underpricing if the cost of gas gets cut in half. But this only relates to accident frequency.

Why, when cars are built safer than ever before, is accident severity increasing? With all the safety items added to vehicles, you would think that severity would be decreasing. We could call this a spike if it does not continue, or a trend if it does. All I know is there seems to be more accidents from distracted driving, running red lights and loss of control. Many of these involve young drivers whose lives are lost or significantly changed due to one wrong decision.

Young drivers tend to take more risk when they are behind the wheel. You can call this the infallibility of youth, but there is usually another factor that contributes to poor driving habits and excessive risk taking. Distracted driving, including texting while driving, as is distracted conversation from other youthful occupants of the vehicle. Once an inexperienced driver’s eyes are off the road for several seconds they cannot react quick enough to avoid a serious accident. Since many young drivers are driving older cars as they start their experience, up-to-date safety features that are in new cars are not in the cars they operate. Unfortunately, we have seen too many of these in Middle Georgia recently.

What can we do? As parents we need to closely monitor vehicle usage and lead by example when we are driving. Kids learn by watching others. Do not be a bad example. As representatives of the industry we need to do a better job educating our future generation on the responsibility and power they have in their hands as they get behind the wheel.

This story was originally published September 6, 2016 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Accidents caused by distracted driving partly to blame for increase in insurance rates."