Leading article: Reinventing the wheel

These are tough times for Britain's car drivers, ground down by a combination of climbing petrol prices and insurance premiums. The average price of insuring a vehicle has gone up by a third in the last nine months alone and could rise by an average of 50 per cent by the end of this year, according to insurers. They blame a range of factors, from the growth in the number of fraudulent claims and uninsured drivers – the costs of which the honest majority has to cover – to the surging cost of settling legal claims.

Some will no doubt suggest that this particular cloud has a large silver lining, in that high petrol and insurance prices will presumably propel a number of people out of their environmentally unfriendly cars and on to public transport, bicycles or their own two legs.

It's a nice idea, but the logic behind it unfortunately is faulty. The problem with swingeing insurance premiums is that they are a blunt and ineffective instrument. They make no distinction between wealthy drivers who can still easily afford to pay up and the poor, who may have no option but to drive. They fail entirely to distinguish between the town and city-dweller for whom driving is only one of several transport options and people living in rural districts who cannot conceivably rely on erratic bus services to go about their lives and run their businesses.

It is worrying also that young drivers are being made to shoulder so much of the burden of these big increases in premiums. It is fair enough that the young should pay more to be insured as they are proportionately more responsible for causing accidents than other age groups. But to compel them to pay insurance bills of a thousand pounds a year sounds counter-productive. Premiums of that scale will inevitably prompt more of them to try to skip paying insurance altogether.

Every thoughtful person in this country wants to see car pollution go down. But the way to go about this is by continuing to invest in better, cheaper rail and bus services and by undertaking practical measures to deter people from driving in large towns and cities, where the car is often a pointless luxury.

We need also to combat an insidious climate of fear that leads too many people to drive tiny distances to shops or schools, merely because they feel that this is safer than walking. What we do not need to do is to further impoverish the young, people on low incomes and countryside dwellers. These rises are unwelcome and ought to be resisted.