[advisedwang]

Insurance is thinking about hard braking as an indicator of a driver with riskier behaviour. Google is showing that it can also be an indicator of risky road designs. These actually kind of point in opposite directions in terms of the causes of hard braking. The certainly can be used in different ways.

[JimBlackwood]

They point in opposite directions because they’re not measuring the same things.

Google is measuring where on the road most hard braking events happen.

Insurers measure who is having the most hard braking events.

[tiagod]

Problem with insurance companies measuring risk this way is that local government externalises costs of bad road design to the people who are unfortunate to have to drive there.

[wongarsu]

Makes you wonder why there aren't more insurance companies out there using their data to lobby local governments to fix their road design. They have all the data to find hotspots, and reducing accidents would increase their margin.

Maybe this would require an insurance company to have outsized market share in a specific area so they are the main beneficiary of the improvement

[DoctorOetker]

It should also be generalize to when (for example a specific corner during dusk or dawn), and for insurers what would also be an important factor would be what other cars are nearby at the hard-braking event, it's not exactly productive to flag the chicken in chicken-or-dare scenario's.

[rogerrogerr]

(Though for an insurer, it’s the same thing - whether you’re risky because you’re a bad driver or because you drive on poorly constructed roads or around other poor drivers is inconsequential to them)

[mschuster91]

Yeah well fuck insurers. We are supposed to get spied upon by our cars with their blackboxes, by our insurers, by Google, by national security services of various countries... and what do we get in return? Dinged for other people's bad behavior which we cannot reasonably control. Either you follow the car in front of you very closely and get hard braking events, or other people switch lanes in front of you and in the worst case slowing down during lane change, provoking yet another hard braking event.

Fuck all of that.

[chad_oliver]

Credit scores are universally hated but they make it possible to offer lower interest rates to more people. Without credit scores, fewer people would have access to credit.

Similarly, people often don't like it when insurers track and score their driving. However, this allows insurers to offer lower insurance fees to more people by _not_ offering lower insurance fees (or instead charging higher fees) to people that are driving in a risky manner. This does of course assume a competitive market for insurance but I think in most countries that's a reasonable assumption.

There's nothing fairer than user-pays, especially when users can choose to pay less by changing their behavior.

[littlestymaar]

> Credit scores are universally hated but they make it possible to offer lower interest rates to more people.

That's probably true in theory, but not in practice, given how high US credit interest rates are compared to European countries for instance.

> Without credit scores, fewer people would have access to credit.

Too many people having access to credit is exactly how we got the worst financial crisis of the century, so it's not really something to brag about… People talk about US public debt a lot, but private debt is even more worrisome.

[cucumber3732842]

>There's nothing fairer than user-pays, especially when users can choose to pay less by changing their behavior.

If user pays is so fair why does anyone who could access credit or liquid assets in excess of their state's minimums have to pay hundreds to thousands per year for auto insurance?

[AlotOfReading]

Most states allow you to go without insurance by fronting the cash. It's called self-insurance. You put up some minimum amount, file a form with the state DMV, and keep the approval certificate in the vehicle like normal.

It's relatively unknown for individuals because most people have no desire to lock up tens or hundreds of thousands of spare dollars just to avoid car insurance. As far as I'm aware it's primarily used by rich collectors who need to insure large collections that don't fit more traditional insurance profiles. Much more useful for businesses.

[cucumber3732842]

>Most states allow you to go without insurance by fronting the cash.

That's BS on it's face. Most states don't allow it or they restrict it to big business and government agencies.

>because most people have no desire to lock up tens or hundreds of thousands of spare dollars just to avoid car insurance.

Most people's money isn't making a return greater than what insurance would cost them.

Second, this completely ignores my point about credit. I can easily get hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit secured against my house or tens of thousands in unsecured credit (credit card). Why must I pay to keep the lights on at some insurance firm?

And I'm not particularly rich. If the numbers pencil out for me then surely they must pencil out for millions of people.

[chad_oliver]

That's an entirely separate issue, isn't it? In my country (New Zealand) there are no requirements to have auto insurance. If you don't have insurance and you hit a million-dollar car you're gonna be in an awkward situation, but that's a risk you're allowed to take.

Note that you _are_ legally required to pay your annual ACC levies, which fund no-fault cover for injuries. However that doesn't cover property damage.

[shepherdjerred]

So, what's your proposal? What should insurers be doing differently?

[mschuster91]

Operate like they did before they had access to surveillance technology that would have made Gestapo and Stasi blush

[cucumber3732842]

This. If you're nearly "perfectly" pricing risk on an individual level then you defeat the point of insurance which is to pool risk.

If my hypothetical cost over an N decade period is within a fraction of a percent of payouts in that time what do I gain by paying for insurance other than creating a principal-agent problem?

[shepherdjerred]

You’re mad the insurance companies are charging you what you owe? You do have the option to self-insure.

[Sharlin]

Some road designs are risky because they encourage risky behavior. And "risky" is relative. A good driver should recognize risky road segments and drive even more defensively than normally.

[yial]

This is true - but it’s hard even for “good” drivers to always understand especially on roads they might not be familiar with.

Example: open space on either side of the road, tends to encourage people to drive faster.

Closing that space (whether by buildings, shrubbery, etc ) will slow the speed.

But I will say there are also “obvious” bad designs - the rare far to short on ramp to merge, where drivers don’t understand how to adjust.

Or the one I most frequently encounter are “blind spots” created by the speed of an intersecting road, where a mirror may be attached to a pole / tree, or a sign reminding people to look left right left, or even instructing where cars should be beyond for a safe pull out.

I know of one intersection near me that both has markers on the road(don’t pull out if cars are at or beyond this marker), and a reminder about looking, but still has a high frequency of accidents.

[morkalork]

There's some that are purely due to space constraints, favourite pet-peeve example is a highway with an overpass crossing it.

In the rural case, the offramp will branch off first and the on ramp will be after the overpass and the drivers taking each never meet.

In the space constrained case, theres one extra lane that serves both, where the drivers taking the on-ramp cross paths with those taking the off ramp. This configuration is absolutely cursed!

[alex43578]

A driver who frequents risky roads is a concern to insurers, just as a driver who has risky behaviors.

The cause of hard braking isn’t mutually exclusive: bad driving or bad road design.

[jstanley]

Similarly, a road that is frequently travelled by risky drivers is a risky road!

[kube-system]

This is part of the reason insurers include zip code in their risk profiles.

[buckle8017]

Driving on bad roads is just as bad for insurance as a bad driver is.