If you live in Nashville (or anywhere else in Tennessee) and drive a car, 2017 brought an important change you should know about: the implementation of the James Lee Atwood Jr. Law, aimed at whittling down the number of uninsured drivers in our state.

Up to now, we’ve had a startling number of those uninsured drivers — according to legislative analysis done around the time the Atwood Law passed, in 2015, more than 1 million uninsured vehicles were on the road in Tennessee, with around 20 percent of our drivers shirking their car-insurance responsibility. That puts us near the top of an unflattering list, with the sixth highest percentage of uninsured drivers in the country. This law means to change that.

The Atwood law went into effect as of Jan. 1, 2017, and here are the basics you should be aware of, as a Tennessee driver and car owner: The Tennessee Department of Revenue will now be regularly verifying your car insurance with a new online system, and law enforcement agencies can access and review that information regularly as well (not just when you go to renew your registration). Those drivers who can’t verify coverage will end up facing increased fines, ramping up if the issue isn’t addressed.