Report says a large part of it is due to increases in severe weather events due to climate change so I guess you reap what you sow. Still doesn't begin to capture the costs of car usage but at least it's a start. Sucks for lower income people who need a car but we need things like this to push people away from car ownership and onto public transit otherwise the inertia of car dependence will stimy any efforts to improve public transit.
Inb4 "but public transit sucks right now I need a car", yes it does but no politician is going to invest in making it better if everyone's driving. We need to push people onto public transit so they can experience how bad it is and pressure there representatives to improve it. If we don't the status quo will remain, the planet will get warmer, more severe weather events will happen and people will die.
I keep arguing this and people don't like it. The pain is necessary, we need people to be inconvenienced so they demand we solve the problem. Our greatest enemy is little stopgap solutions that kind of help people now at the cost of their future, like subsidizing oil to make gas prices cheaper.
It really sucks that people who are already having a hard time, people who don't have money or time, are going to be the first to feel the pain. There's definitely things we can do to help, but we all know that at least America isn't going to do those things. I just don't see a better way. Kicking the can down the road isn't going to help them either, it's just going to put them in a worse spot later.
You have to have a pretty limited view of humanity to think this is uncaring. Higher insurance costs and people driving less is mostly just inconvenient for people in rich developed nations. Meanwhile the climate change mostly caused by the excessive pollution of those people is and will cause even more suffering due to severe weather events, drought, famine etc. This will disproportionately effect the most vulnerable people in developing and poor countries which have contributed way less to climate change. Look at a map of per capital emissions then look at one for countries that will suffer the most due to climate change and tell me how that is fair or humane.
But yeah, I'm unsympathetic, go on and tell a person dying of heat in India whose never even driven a car how I'm inhumane for not feeling more sad about you paying more for car insurance, cunt.
In a sense that there needs to be a way to show that the status quo of only maintaining/expanding car infrastructure and providing nothing else as viable alternative is a dead one. Ridiculous insurance increases is part of that.
Fixed route and Accessible buses are possible even in smaller cities like Missoula, MT, population 70k, which provides fare-free transit service to its residents. In bigger cities, mass transit, urban and interurban rail needs to be explored and expanded today, else these problems will only get worse with no end in sight.
I agree with the cost of private cars in the US are detrimentally low. We have insanely subsidized gas, the car owners don't pay for the cost of the roads (see federal gas tax being laughably low), and the side effect health hazards (noise, plastics dust, crash deaths) are considered normal despite the sheer suffering they cause.
That said, making cars more painful (cost/time) must be coupled with the work of rebuilding our infrastructure to modern standards. This means normal frequency mass transit (8 minute or less intervals), separated bike roads, and pedestrian safety put over car speed.
It can be done (there's solutions to all of the superficial emotional jabs people seem to throw online), it just takes work to get our cities back from the clutches of the car only thinking we've been doing for 60+ years.