The Insurance Lobby is trying to block a Contributory Negligence fix.
On Thursday, AAA Mid-Atlantic sent a disingenuous email to its DC members with some exaggerated claims about the effects of the Motor Vehicle Collision Recovery Act of 2015. The bill, which fixes a glaring injustice in our legal system, goes up for a D.C. Council vote on Tuesday.
If you haven’t yet, please send a note to your Councilmembers asking them to support the bill. You can also join us on the steps of the Wilson Building on Tuesday morning to show support for the bill.
On Friday afternoon, WABA circulated a memo debunking the insurance lobby’s claims to Councilmembers and their staff . Here is a summary of the memo:
Property Casualty Insurers of America (“PCI”), a national trade association representing auto insurers in D.C., has circulated a misleading “analysis” of bicycle and pedestrian crash data to suggest that if the Motor Vehicle Collision Recovery Act of 2015 (B21-4) passes, auto insurance rates will jump 24%. A careful evaluation of the analysis shows that it is based upon flawed assumptions and grossly inflated cost data.
The primary flaw in the analysis was the use of an outdated (2004) study to determine the total lifetime costs of traffic crash injuries to bicyclists and pedestrians to society, not actual insurance claims. Using this much larger and inflated estimate, the PCI analysis exaggerates the impact. More importantly, no evidence was presented to suggest a causal relationship exists between the legislation and insurance rates, and if that was the case, what the actual rise in rates could be, if any.
The PCI analysis assumes 100% of crashes will involve DC-insured drivers. According to the 2014 DDOT Traffic Safety Statistics Report, only 37% of total traffic crashes involve a DC driver. Maryland and Virginia drivers alone account for 46.9% of all crashes in the District. The costs of crashes associated with bicyclists and pedestrians would be spread much further into the regional insurance pool, not solely in the District’s.
Finally, for some context, bicycle and pedestrian traffic injuries account for only 15% of total traffic injuries in D.C. according the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The need for fair compensation for injured bicyclists and pedestrians is great and insurers of negligent drivers should be responsible for harm caused. But, to claim that compensation of an additional 15% of total injuries would cause such significant increase to auto insurance rates is not credible.
In cases where a bicyclist or pedestrian is the less negligent party, the victim should be entitled to fair compensation and not 100% barred from recovery, as is the law in 46 other states.