A new report from Green Flag shows that we are spending more time than ever before simply waiting – be it in a traffic jam, in a shop queue or for a delivery.
The report reveals we spend around six months of our life just waiting! It seems over a third of the people asked spend over and hour a week waiting in queues at shops and supermarkets. Add in waiting at service organisations, especially banks, and that figure rises to almost two hours.
We are all familiar with waiting in traffic, from the school run delays in the morning, through shopping traffic and the often disrupted motorway journeys. These can be infuriating but Green flag do advocate a policy of not getting stressed to avoid ill health and accidents.
A traffic queue can sometime lead people to drive more aggressively to get out of it, or into a space, but the upshot of that is they may then have to make a claim on their car insurance, which will cost them far more than the time they spent waiting.
The car is being blamed for most of the pollution of the world, though this is far from reality as far as many are concerned. However Budget Insurance are on hand to help make it all better with their new emissions offsetting car insurance policy.
The insurer claims that one hundred percent of the customers carbon dioxide emissions will be offset for the duration of the policy. How this will work is that a contribution will be made to projects organised by the Carbon Neutral Company, who are overseeing different eco friendly activities across the globe that are helping clean it up.
This initiative from Budget Insurance is seen by some as a practical solution to going green, recognising that the car is a much needed mode of transport in many parts of the UK, but wanting to do something to mitigate its effects on the environment.
The view of Swinton, the biggest insurance broker on the high street, is that drivers with six points plus on their licence will soon be the norm, categorised as standard.
With the advent of the speed camera and the often scandalously low speeds at which they are set to trigger, Swinton feel it is not right to automatically penalise drivers because of these points. Bearing in mind the fact that approximately six million drivers have points on their licence, which is over ten percent of the whole population of the country, the approach from the insurer seems a very fair and sensible one.
Swinton are taking the view that the driver with six points on their licence today is as safe as the one who had three points five years ago and no points ten years ago. We just hope other insurers follow suit.
