It’s cheaper and less of a hassle to be a good driver in more ways than one. You don’t have to worry about unpaid tickets for one, and your insurance rates won’t be higher for another. If you’re unlucky enough to have the high rates of a bad driver, some of the things you can do to decrease your costs are to enroll in a defensive driving or other traffic school course, develop good driving habits, and/or wait for those moving violations to drop from your record. If may take a while, but after a few years your hard work will pay off and you’ll see your insurance rates lower to something less heart attack-inducing.
The insurance rates for careless and reckless drivers will be higher than those that drive carefully as a way of penalizing them for their actions. After all, rewarding someone for being a bad driver doesn’t make much sense. When it boils down to it, all insurance is based on some kind of risk. When a driver is involved in an accident the insurance company has to pay a claim, and doing so costs them money. Therefore, bad drivers, riskier drivers, have to pay more. In some cases bad drivers have to pay double than good drivers, excellent motivation for them to clean up their driving record.
Despite what people may think, it’s men that have worse driving records than women. Men are at least 50 percent more likely to drive reckless, not wear their seatbelt, speed, and not yield at stop signs/signals than their female counterparts. Research has found that women are about 27 percent less likely to be at fault when involved in an automobile accident.