No Desire to Drive

[Mercano]

I support you Ding Dong.

Here in my country, taxes and fuel are so high priced that is like having a baby... you have to spend lot of money monthly just to have a car, not even driving it. I don't need a car for my job or to move myself, i prefer public transport, i just have to be sit or stand and let someone else put atenttion on the road, and at low price!

Cheers.

 

[Nykur_Myrkvi]

I like driving actually but I understand the OP's point of view.

I didn't enjoy it when I first started driving. I even waited an extra two years before I even started learning.

In Iceland you can't rely too much on the public transportation system though. It's quite a mess. They keep bringing the prices up while cutting services. A friend of mine who had always taken the bus, never needed a car, had to choose between buying a car or changing his job because suddenly the bus doesn't go near his house early in the morning or late afternoon/evening.

Even one of the two big malls here has bus problems. On normal days it closes at 6 pm and that's when the bus stops going there.

That means if you're working there (and if you are you are probably there at least half an hour more) you have no possibility of public transport. Once a week it's open until 9 pm so even if you´d get to leave early you're still f***ed.

I'm lucky because my house is situated close to the main bus route and so is my place of work so one bus gets me there and back but because of the insane amount of people relying on that specific bus on the standard work/school hours sometimes people get left behind as the bus is over it's capacity.

This system has to change if not owning a car is to become a possibility.

Or well...it is a possibility if you are planning to work and live only close the the main line and do nothing else throughout the day unless it is close to one of the few buses that actually runs until 10 pm/midnight.

/rant

 

[Xaios]

However - insurance came a-knockin. It turned out that, even though I'd just passed and HADN'T EVEN HAD THE CHANCE TO DO ANYTHING WRONG, my insurance quotes were sky high. Cheapest was around £3,600 at the time. Tried every suggested hypothetical 'method' of getting cheaper quotes, none of it worked. I had to wait a year and hope that the premiums come down.

I'll respond to this, as I'm an insurance broker by trade.

The fact is, unfortunately, that as a young guy, you are at the highest risk of havng an at-fault accident. Now, let me tell you this. When I go driving, I swear that I see more girls driving like maniacs than I do guys these days. But then when I see the numbers, they still show that young guys are the ones having the grand majority of the accident.

However, there's another factor that's worth considering: insurance law, or rather, in the event of an accident, what will the law force your insurance to pay for. Now, admittedly, I have zero knowledge of insurance law in the UK, so I'll use local examples.

Here in Canada, insurance law is dependant on your province of residence, rather being nation-wide (the provinces and territories of course have reciprocity agreements that state if two people are involved in an accident from different jurisdictions, policies will always pay for things they wouldn't normally under their own jurisdiction). Here in the Yukon, insurance is based on Tort Law. Among the many details of that arrangement is that, if someone hits you, their insurance pays for the property damage caused. Now, this can create some strained situations because people aren't always willing to report at-fault claims to their insurance companies because their premiums may go up, so settlements can become quite delayed. However, it also keeps costs down, so insurance is relatively inexpensive here.

Ontario, conversely, has a No-Fault insurance system. That means that, if someone else hits you, your own insurance policy is the one that pays for the damage. Now this has positives. Firstly, you'll always be compensated by your own insurance so long as you're not at fault. Also, it reduces wait time. However, because the No-Fault system is also far more costly for insurance companies in general, it necessitates an additional form of coverage called "Direct Compensation," the cost of which is passed on to the consumer.

Also, there are certain proclivities with insurance law that can cause trouble. This may have been changed at this point, but a big hot-button insurance issue in Ontario a couple years ago was the fact that, because of how Accident Benefits coverage had to be worded, it opened the door for a truly ridiculous amount of fraudulent soft tissue injury claims. Basically, if there was any remote situation in which you could claim a soft tissue injury, you could make a no-fault claim against your policy which your insurance company would have to pay out. And because many soft-tissue injuries are difficult or sometimes impossible to disprove, the insurance companies didn't have any recourse with which to prove a claim was fraudulent. The result was people were bleeding the insurance companies dry with false claims, which resulted in Accident Benefits premiums (a mandory coverage if you've got liability insurance on a vehicle) skyrocketing. This compounded the problem, because then honest people were legitimately feeling screwed, and were more prone to turning into dishonest people by making fraudulent claims in order to get their money back. A vicious cycle.

 

[Captain Shoggoth]

Today I turned the legal age to learn to/begin driving (17 here in the UK), and I can't wait personally. /shrug

 

[benduncan]

Bwahaha, hate to call you out on this, but this is like the most american thing I've ever heard....

'Wait, you DON'T like big trucks? Why don't you go live in a log cabin, you damn commie!'

I kid, I kid. In all seriousness though, I know what you mean, you could see driving as a necessity if you're in that situation. Where I live in the UK, public transport is pretty terrible but it's not useless. However I lived in a place that was down south and out in the sticks, public transport was getting on for unexistant and the roads were unsafe enough to drive, never mind walk or cycle. Then, I had no choice but to drive to work.

I think the OP's ability to see that it's within his means to do without a car, is nothing more than sensible resource management. A lot of people would be tempted into the luxury of a car if they didn't really need it and become quite lazy (I've been guilty of this myself....well, using it when I shouldn't have)

haha, thats not exactly what i was attempting to convey. the point that i was trying to make was that of course if you think outside the box things like cars and money are stupid. but this is the world that i was born into.

and i dont like big trucks, lol, i think that theyre part of the big dick contest between men, mostly

i think its great when people are able to live without a car, and there's obviously the debate, would the world be better off without the current automobile? when i just typed that i answered yes followed by a but, then a no, then a yes.... lol. at the same time, if someone uses one more than when they need to, i dont think that they are guilty of anything. you could say the same thing about food and water. im talking within reason, not like chris christie or anything.

i love opening up debate and thought on topics that are not normally part of mainstream thought... but i just thought that the op was a little poorly worded(as was my response) and maybe a bit pretentious. "i think this and that is stupid" et cetera

and if you disagree youre a nazi socialist

 

[The_Mop]

Xaios: Interesting what you say. And tbh, yeah, I know I'm apparently 'at risk' because i'm a relatively young male driver. Problem is, that people of a similar age, background, getting into similar cars and driving in similar areas got insured for a hell of a lot less than me and I honestly can't figure out why. Oh and, just so it's clear, I'm not /that/ young - passed at 21 (uni got in the way!) and only really started driving for myself at 22 because of premiums.

The other thing that's fucked up is that, in the UK, most insurers appear to be a law unto themselves. One of my mum's friends works for some big insurer, and apparently they technically and legally can wriggle their way out of a pay out in almost any situation - the only reason they pay out is because if they don't do so some of the time, they're techincally not operating as an insurance company. They've taken a lot of flak recently for charging insane amounts for young drivers in the UK. I saw someone get in the paper for saying they were quoted 31k - nothing on my 38k quote! The problem is that no UK insurance company actually comes up with a decent flexible solution, they just price people off the road. And then wonder why so many people drive without insurance.

There's a thing in the UK called 'Pass Plus' - it's like an extra qualification for driving. Truth is, it's useless. Most insurers pretend to offer discounts for it, but then they'll have a policy that because you're a young driver you get some really minimal token discount of significantly less than they're offering for pass plus, then claim they only offer one discount per premium to wriggle out of it.

But you make a good point. It's the idiots who go street racing and shit like that or the dumb arses who plain can't drive that run the premiums up, and the fraud. The worst thing is that there's very few mechanisms for me to 'prove' that I'm a safe driver other than just wait out a few years of expensive premiums and just build up a number of no claims years. And the alternative is to accept the 'Orwellian Regime' box to record absolutely bloody everything I'm doing and put limits on what I can and can't do

 

[SirMyghin]

I went til 26 without a car and the convinience is worthwhile, as transit in Hamilton sucks.

As far as 'spending 10k for something that moves fast is stupid', might be a worthwhile statement if 10k was a sizable sum of money, but big picture, it is fuck all.

My career requires driving, and often a vehicle, so I got my license in preparation for my career. If I had chosen a different job I would be driving my vehicle a whole lot more too.

I get many hours per week more life due to having a vehicle and driving. Going to the store 10k away no longer takes 2.5-3 hours.

 

[Xaios]

Mop, out of curiosity, do you know exactly what kind of coverage your were being quoted for? As in, what were the coverage limits, and the individual premium being charged for each section of the coverage?

 

[brynotherhino]

I would love to ride my bike to get around everywhere, but its frankly not safe to do so. There are a couple spots that I can go on training rides, but riding around except for certain times is just stupid and there are no bike lanes. Its dangerous enough being in my truck haha, but if there is a bust out here traffic thins out quite a bit, I will ride everywhere. Riding so stinking fun and enjoyable, wish I could ride everywhere!