Boston residents: Do you want to pay more for car insurance?

As we speak, Geiko is editing its small print to "Not available in New Jersey."

I'd have no problem if they took away the incentive for bad drivers to keep driving bad, i.e. rates lower then what they would pay if they were not subsidized from good drivers.

But the problem lies in that good drivers are still subsidizing bad drivers due to the way rates are going to be allocated by the insurance co's. The only difference is now instead of good drivers all across the state subsidizing them, it becomes the good drivers in metro areas. As far as I know the biggest percentage of what your rate is the likelihood of getting into an accident computed by the claims rate of your town, city or burrow. That means now we'll be subsidizing them even more, even as their rates skyrocket. So who wins? Who loses?

Undoubtedly the insurance CO's who will make a killing on new rates on bad drivers willing and able to pay. The people in the suburbs and west of the state will no longer subsidies bad drivers at the levels they do now, so good for them. But what about the people who have good records, but live in area where bad drivers cause more accidents? Doesn't this unfairly move the rate in-equality on them? And before you said, "tough luck they live near the city." I ask why is that argument any different the "tough luck, we all live in Massachusetts". This is unfairly going to be hard on good drivers with small incomes around and in the city.

Short term I also see a spike in bad drivers who are driving uninsured because they are unable or unwilling to pay the higher premiums they'll get. I don't feel any pity for them, but what happens when they cause another accident? Stiffer penalties for driving uninsured might be a better idea temporarily.

Now if they revamp how they rate you, basing it almost exclusively on past driving record, and age when you first start driving, and move away from the "your more likely to get into an accident here" crap, then I'm all for this! But they won't, because they're not going to micro manage rates like that.

Is there anywhere that lists the relative rates for auto insurance in each city and town? I mean, if Boston is the "standard"--let's say an address right at the State House--that could have a rating of 100, and every town or neighborhood would have a rating relative to that, obviously for the same driving record and household type. Just about all of the ratings would be less than 100, of course, downtown Boston being a bad place to own a car. I've never seen those numbers published. But if we could read them, we'd know what the situation is now and how we could expect to see it change.

The current zip-code based system is heavily geared toward screwing towns with a lot of commercial and highway traffic.

People in some of the wealthy towns have lower premiums because their zip codes record fewer accidents. It doesn't mean their drivers are better, it means they don't have shopping plazas and interstates cutting through them! In other words, Winchester pays lower rates than Medford and Woburn, but it isn't because Winchester drivers are better, it is because their drivers have their accidents in neighboring towns that they commute through or shop in.

Why not gear it to the zip codes that bad drivers (or drivers at fault) come FROM rather than where they wreak their havoc? I'm not saying the drivers where I live are good, but they are not substantially better or even different than those in Arlington, where I lived previously and paid less insurance. Zip codes people are from are MUCH better predictors of risk in terms of shopping and commuting patterns than where drivers actually have their accidents, if professional experience with demographic information in general serves me well.