How much more damage to our environment
will be caused in the interests of the motorcar?
One of the major issues of the last half of the 20th century and the
beginning of the 21st has been the massive increase in the number of
motor cars on our road system. Going back to the 50s and 60s huge
efforts were made to clear these vehicles of our town and country roads
by means of a massive programme of motorway construction which cost the
country billions of pounds, and which for a short while relieve many
towns and cities of the nose to tail traffic jams with which we have
become accustomed. Unfortunately, this was only a temporary reprieve
because the numbers of cars owned by ordinary members of the public
continued to increase dramatically (there are now roughly 15 times as
many cars in Britain as there was in 1950) with the result that the jams
came back, not only in the towns and cities but on the motorways too. It
appears that our love affair with the motorcar is showing no signs of
going away.
During this time of a boom in the number of motor vehicles, the car
insurance industry has also boomed! Unfortunately, at first the industry
still clung to its old-fashioned methods of doing business, and the
majority of policies were still sold by the inefficient method of
providing them via insurance agencies who, naturally, charged a stiff
fee for their services, although this was buried within the cost of
every policy they sold. A new and very successful development was
insurance sales over the telephone, and then with the coming of the
Internet age a huge and growing number of policies were sold through
websites. Not only was there a large volume of business but this
business itself was changing; people nowadays are more eager to embrace
new and more convenient products, and one products which, it seemed, a
ready market existed for was short term car insurance (details
here).
From very small beginnings the sale of short-term policies has exploded
into thousands per month, as motorists have discovered that they now
have the ability to legally drive their friends, neighbours, or indeed
own cars for short periods whenever they wish to. All they need to do is
visit a short term car insurance website, get a quotation, pay for the
policy online and then they can have insurance cover granted to them
immediately.
These policies are designed to be as simple as humanly possible with
very short application forms, in contrast to a normal twelve-month
policy application form which requires vast amounts of detail. In order
to avoid finding themselves paying out a disproportionately high number
of claims as a result of this, short-term insurance companies have
restricted their policies to people with a reasonable driving record;
and they have excluded all those under the age of 21 (25 in some cases)
on the very reasonable grounds that this age group is responsible for a
very high number of accidents, with a commensurate high number of
claims.
It is possible for people under 21 to buy insurance for a shorter period
than a year, but the absolute minimum period at the date of writing this
article is one month.
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