Minimum car insurance is required in almost every state. How come it’s so difficult to require all insurance carriers to employ some uniform format/signature so that all official entities can easily scan and see if you’re driving around uninsured? One would think it’s as easy as issuing an EZtag or EZpass etc along with your policy, or maybe even just issue some extra code associated with the insured vehicle’s VIN or plate.
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There is such a system. There can be issues with lagging updates but the information is available to law enforcement. Given the lack of attention to moving violations I’d guess that police just don’t see it as a priority.
If you’re in an accident and the police officer asks to see proof of insurance, and you can’t come up with it, then that’s grounds for suspecting your uninsured. That’s when the “enforcement” starts to happen.
Most people who are uninsured cannot afford the insurance, and therefore cannot afford to pay damages either, so suing those people is at best a futile, symbolic effort.
A lot of other countries do exactly this. You do not actually need any additional technology as number plate scanners are good enough to enforce it. The problem is that there are strong laws against government surveillance in the US and a lot of political opposition to any form of government surveillance. So number plate scanners which can automatically read all the number plates and enter them into a central database is not easy to get approved. Even just a full database of all the vehicle registrations in the US currently does not exist and they certainly does not have things like insurance information.
It is easier for private companies to do this because they are not the government. You mention EZtag and EZpass but they are opt-in, which you can not do for insurance enforcement. The repo industry have adapted license plate scanners and even central databases but this is not legal everywhere. And it would not be legal for any government to do the same.
Another approach would be something like a tax sticker. Either demanding proof of insurance to get the tax sticker or a separate insurance sticker. However tax stickers are not easy to enforce at all. It is hard to read the little sticker in a hurry. So police only check it if they already stop the vehicle and at that point they will usually have to ask for proof of insurance from the driver anyway. All the countries that adopted license plate scanners stopped issuing tax stickers either at the same time or before the scanners.
Because states don’t want to do so. It’s easier than we think. Each state licenses insurance companies to operate in the state. The states could require the insurance companies to send the VINs of each vehicle insured by each company monthly or every three months. The state could correlate the policy number to the license plate number and create a list of license plate numbers having no policy number associated with it. Letters could be sent to the vehicle owner to rectify the situation or law enforcement will confiscate the license plates.
Some states insure the car not the driver. So the car would be insured if your kids drove it and got in an accident but if your kids don’t have their own insurance they be uninsured drivers if they drive something that doesn’t have it.
I think it is mostly an unwillingness of the government to actually do anything about the problem rather than it being to hard to do anything about it.
You can tell, by the fact that in other countries, there is much less of a problem with people driving without license or insurance.
In California, they’ll cancel your vehicle registration if your liability insurance lapses (although I think it takes like 30 days).
no need to complicate it, here you don’t get a set of number plates without getting an (liability) insurance and as long as you have those plates the insurance company bascially has to cover damages. If you stop paying you insurance they will quickly start to fine you and try to recover the plates.
So if the car a has plates it has insurance
I live in Texas. If your registration is expired or if you dont have insurance, especially in Montgomery County, the police will stop you and look for drugs or alcohol. It’s really bad in Magnolia. I refuse to go to that place, even though it’s the nearest place with commodities and services. I’ll drive to College Station an hour away before I drive through Magnolia again.
The way we do it in Aus is that Comprehensive Third Party (CTP) is paid as part of your vehicle registration. Honestly, I think this should be more common in the US. And that way, if you’re driving without insurance, by default you’re driving unregistered. We even have a list of providers we can choose for CTP.
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