Commonwealth Cowboys

The cowboys of the Commonwealth, who drive autos instead of pintos have aways posed a problem for Massachusetts insurance companies. Sheltered by their compulsory insurance policies, the cowboys keep plowing into other cars with abandon, and leave the companies holding the bill for damages. As a result, company deficits and insurance rates have been pushing each other upwards for three years.

Because a good share of the cowboys are teenagers, four large insurance companies have suggested the streets be cleared of 18-21 year old drivers after 9 p.m. For College students, of course, this would be a practical inconvenience and a social catastrophe. But apart from this, the curfew seems the wrong approach to the problem of insurance and accident rates.

The present state insurance setup is almost ideally suited to the cowboys. Under it, everybody must buy insurance, at a cuy-wide rate determined by the recklessness of the city's driving population as a whole. As a result, the biggest daredevil in Cambridge pays no more for his oft-used policy than the most careful driver. Since damages are easy to collect from Massachusetts juries, the cowboys can charge their repairs to the insurance companies and drive on to more and better crashes.

The best way to reduce accidents is to make their perpetrators pay for them. If the flat city policy rates were changed to personal rates, scaled according to number of accidents and amount of damages, it would shift the high costs from the careful drivers to the reckless. If policies for frequent offenders were expensive enough, insurance companies could cover their damage costs and even allow drivers to forego insurance until after their first or second accident.

Finally, a pre-trial hearing on accident disputes would not only clear up the present court glut but also let a judge, instead of a chronically munificent jury, award damages.

The insurance companies' plan to curtail young drivers because they have too many accidents may sound asfounding, but it gropes toward the right principle. Instead of punishing any one group, be it an age unit or a city, an equitable insurance plan should single out the reckless drivers wherever they are, and pin the insurance costs on them.