Economic conditions and the price of gasoline must also differentially affect the driving of women and men as two demographic groups with a large difference in income distributions. In 1990, 41 percent of women drivers drove less than 5,000 miles, while about half as many men drivers were in this low mileage category (Hu and Young, 1993, p. 3-20). Conversely, in the high mileage category, nearly 30% of men drove more than 20,000 miles while only 11% of women drove that much. The difference between the mileage distributions of women and men leaves little doubt that a greater proportion of women than men would gain a deserved and risk-based net saving from a change from per year to per mile insurance. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that it is individuals, not groups, who drive cars and that individuals respond differently to changes in the cost of driving and also to changes in economic conditions.

Current flat pricing is buttressed by strong insurer marketing mythologies. Prime examples are the selective reality of women’s greater “safety” as drivers and the statistically absurd idea that risk can be individually assessed by use of driver-record and claim-free pricing. Moreover, recent research on women drivers has sought to problematize the increase in women’s annual accident involvement, rather than to explain it as an inevitable consequence of an increase in women’s average miles of exposure to accident risk. Press releases announcing research findings generate invidious newspaper headlines like “Road hazard? Women are more accident-prone, U-M study finds” (Greenwood, 1993). more information about insurance,please visit details at http://74.200.250.2/~allidexc/blogs/onlineautoinsurance/auto_insurance_quotes_with_no_down_payment.html

Academics inexcusably ignore past criticism of the auto insurance price structure. For example, in a 1968 law and economics study, one of this year’s Nobel prize winners, William Vickrey, attempted to call attention to “the frequently overlooked fact that the manner in which premiums are computed and paid fails miserably to bring home to the automobile user the costs he imposes in a manner that will appropriately influence his decisions” (Vickrey, 1968). Subsequent scholarly indifference to this strong condemnation can only be explained in terms of protecting a subsidy for higher-mileage drivers as a politically and economically powerful group. University researchers, however, have a responsibility to set aside class and sex politics. They need to contribute constructively to an emerging and long overdue critique of the practice of charging for automobile insurance as a fixed cost of car ownership rather than as a variable cost of car use, the activity that produces traffic accidents.