How can there be so many uninsured motorists ?

If you can verify someone's VAT number online without breaching data protection rules, then surely it can be done for someone's insurance number?
 
You'd probably need the insurance companies as well to go with a standard format for the policy numbers, set number of digits etc and obviously different ones for each company, at the moment there is no reason there could not be duplication same as there was with bank account numbers but the sort code differentiated them. Maybe a sort code type system for the company and then the policy number.
 
A fair amount of that figure could be older people now in care, but who haven't disposed of their vehicles, and younger people who have emigrated with the intention of returning. Plenty of crashed cars on blocks still as well....
 
I was asking one of my visiting uk "outlaws" about the UK situation on uninsured cars and he said there's about 2 million over there. So it's not only an Irish thing.
 
According to https://data.gov.uk/dataset/driving-licence-data, there are

Driving licence holders 38,558,731
Provisl Licence holders 7,769,398
Total Licensed Drivers 46,328,129 in GB as of May 2016 (excludes NI which reports separately)

According to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...w-many-uninsured-drivers-are-on-the-road.html

in 2013 there 1,200,000 uninsured drivers on the UK's roads. That would give a % of uninsured drivers as 2.59%

If someone wants to mess with other data-sets (finding them first of course) feel free to do so.

According to RSA we have a total of 2,764,069 licence/permit holders as of Dec 2015 of whom 150,000 are estimated to be uninsured. This gives a percentage of uninsured drivers of 5.43%, a situation that on the surface appears to be twice as bad as GB.
 
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RichInSpirit said:
....So it's not only an Irish thing.
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Putting aside Mathepac's great bit of research for a moment, the fact that there are issues outside of Ireland with motorists not having insurance ranks second to what goes on here in Ireland
 
Delboy said:
Subsume road tax into the cost of fuel. Extra 1 or 2c per litre. Simple.
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Not so simple. This would shift the balance of the tax burden from private individuals to industry - a tuck/van/taxi/rental burns a lot more diesel per year than a commuter car. It would also tend to promote cross-border fuel shopping and smuggling.


The Edge said:
Yep. Motorists are treated as a cash cow by government. The current system is manifestly and very obviously unfair. It fails at a basic level.
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A few years ago I would have agreed, but then I saw LA.
Single-commuter cars, and the landscape they create, are a blight and an economic disaster.
I can't think of a better way to discourage their ownership and use than tax.
 

Shifting the balance of the tax burden onto those who use the roads more, seems entirely appropriate to me and while in many cases that might impact on commercial travelers, it is not exclusively hitting them.

As for the point about fuel smuggling, additional resources would be freed up if we changed how motor tax is collected and administered. These resources could be redirected to work with customs and excise to combat the fuel smugglers.

I would expect that currency differences, proximity to petrol stations in N.I. and the UK tax system would limit the cross-border fuel shopping you refer to.
 
trasneoir said:
A few years ago I would have agreed, but then I saw LA.
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I've only spent a day in LA and was as part of a holiday so can't really comment but everything I've read/heard confirms the stereotype.

trasneoir said:
Single-commuter cars, and the landscape they create, are a blight and an economic disaster.
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Completely agree.

trasneoir said:
I can't think of a better way to discourage their ownership and use than tax.
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Tbh, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and some Chinese and Indian cities make LA look like paradise. But I'm not sure if I agree with your view that tax is the best or only way to discourage their ownership....it doesn't seem to have worked in Ireland, where the obsession with single-commuter car ownership and the status symbology around driving a decent motor is as strong as ever.
 
The Edge said:
But I'm not sure if I agree with your view that tax is the best or only way to discourage their ownership.
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I'm not sure either, but I know that when you reach into somebody's pocket you usually get their attention

We've got a really destructive habit, and almost nobody notices the full extent of the harm/cost. I know people who spend 500-600 hours per year commuting, and their only cost that they notice is the cost to their wallet. Not their time, not the infrastructure, not their health. We need them to notice, and we want it to sting enough that they do something about it.

I totally accept that there might be more effective/targeted ways to charge people - I like road pricing and congestion charges. There's also lots we could do to make the alternatives more attractive, obvious, and widely available.
 
We shouldn't forget the absolute joke penalties handed out for not having insurance... How can you not give someone a custodial sentence for this???

Uninsured driver reversed towards garda patrol car: A young man who stopped in the middle of a dual carriageway, switched off his car lights and reversed towards an oncoming garda patrol car has been given a three-month suspended sentence for a second no-insurance offence... Judge McHugh imposed the suspended sentence and disqualified him from driving for four years for having no insurance, and convicted and fined him €250 for the driving without due care and attention offence.
http://www.herald.ie/news/courts/uninsured-driver-reversed-towards-garda-patrol-car-35348501.html
 
There is always a practical problem about verifying valid insurance in relation to the driver of a vehicle as distinct from the vehicle itself.

I am stopped by a Garda doing a random check. I produce a current certificate of insurance and my equally valid current licence. The Garda will see those as being in order and send me on my way. The trouble is that I may not be insured. Suppose that I deliberately misrepresented a material fact to obtain the motor insurance. I have not really got valid insurance and when my misrepresentation is eventually discovered it will be voided by the insurer.

My point is that there is a superficial randomness about insurance checks and they are not all that they are cracked up to be.

On the wider point, my experience is that there are two general classes of uninsured motorists. There are those who knowingly and deliberately commit the offence. There are those who commit the offence unknowingly and innocently. In the latter case although there may be no valid insurance it is possible for such a driver to be acquitted of the offence of driving with no insurance.

On a side point, I as quite disturbed to see a recent report that around 8,000 people were driving whilst disqualified. Every one of those must, by definition, also be driving without insurance as motor insurance is not valid if the driver is disqualified.
 
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Is it fair to assume that those 8,000 who have been disqualified are also on a list somewhere ? ... if so, then surely that list could easily be obtained and random spot checks done on an ongoing basis, to see who is and who is not obeying the law.



This entire situation regarding so many drivers behind the steering wheel of a car while banned, or the thousands driving without insurance is just typical of all thats wrong with Ireland... just about anything you care to name is flawed or corrupt !
 

Some people just cannot help themselves in their rigid insistence on being utterly indifferent to what is required of them.

This reminds me of a classic case with which I had some dealings a few years ago. The driver of the car had no insurance or road tax [pre NCT days] or driving licence . He was hopelessly drunk. What did he do ? He drove right up the back end of a marked Garda squad car that was stationary, in broad daylight, at a red traffic light. He subsequently failed the attitude test by completely ignoring the court date for the hearing of the multiple summonses. He turned up in court alright but only after the Gardaí found him, arrested him and put him before the court. He was remanded in custody pending trial but got no jail time in the end by way of punishment.

Some of these people just do not care and you would have to meet them to believe how bad their attitude is.
 
I firmly believe that most of the problems in this area are because of lack of enforcement using existing laws and technology. Rocket science it is not!
 
That's Ireland. Where we make rules and create legislation to solve all our problems but there's uproar if the rules are ever enforced. "It's not fair, I was only a little bit above the speed limit...I only parked there for two minutes...insurance was only a few days out.....etc"
 
Thats because there is an expectation that the rules arent going to be enforced... so people ignore them. Chicken and egg... if we had less rules but actually enforced them, then people would know not to break the rules.
 
The law that was brought in last year about smoking in the car with kids present. 2 penalty points. A lot of talk at the time about whether it would work but the do gooders insisted we needed it.
There has been ZERO cases brought under this. Unenforcable say the Gardai.
 
We should have a feedback loop for new legislation after say 2 yrs, or another suitable timeframe. A check on the effectiveness of the change. No doubt some politician will claim if there have been no convictions then people have got the message.
 
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