Picture this: You are at a stop light, toggling between episodes of Freakanomics podcasts on your iPod, when “Bam,” a car rear ends you. His car knocks yours into the intersection where a host of cars bash you back and forth. You’re safe, but your car is totaled. But that’s not the worst news. Turns out he doesn’t have insurance.

Simple, right? Arrest the guy (leave this part to the police), and collect the money while he’s in jail. Sorry, that’s not how things work. You just earned yourself a trip to a car dealership, that is, if you even have money to pay for a new vehicle. Either way, you are paying for his mistake.

Current estimates have the amount of uninsured motorists on the roads at anywhere from 14 percent to 25 percent. Just think, potentially a quarter of all drivers don’t have insurance. The odds that one will hit you are hard to ignore, and judging by your propensity to listen to Freakanomics, you should have paid attention to the numbers.

So what’s a driver to do? The easiest solution out there is to add uninsured or underinsured motorist protection to your policy. It’s usually only about $15 to $50 twice a year, which if we break it down numerically, isn’t really that bad.

Let’s say you drive a 2008 Subaru Impreza, worth about $14,000. Let’s say, within 5 years of driving, the likelihood that you get in an accident is about 50 percent. Some people get in multiple accidents a year, some only one in a lifetime of driving. But you can’t predict if someone will hit you. Just to be safe, let’s assume you have a 50 percent chance you’ll be hit by another driver. If that occurs, you have a 25 percent chance that the driver won’t be insured, and that means you are out about $10,000 - $14,000.

However, if you paid for uninsured motorist protection for those five years, it would cost you only $500 at the most.

So what’s worse: paying $500 for five years knowing that you’re safe, or driving around with a one in eight chance that you have to pay upwards of $10,000, and that’s in no one is hurt?