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Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

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Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

#151

Post by mountain_peak »

duped wrote: post #86
mountain_peak wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a safe following distance is incredibly challenging on busy freeways where hard braking is often 'required'. Most people have likely found themselves in this situation: vehicle changes lanes in front of you; you slow down to maintain a safe following distance, another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you. Repeat for your entire commute. Incredibly frustrating, and I've driven all over North Am…

Why does this require "hard" braking? If another car cuts in front of you just decelerate gently. You don't brake and wait until the gap is big enough (also if this is stop-and-go traffic, you should be trying to avoid braking at all)

My original observation wasn't worded as well as it could have been. I meant in situations where hard braking could be required on a moment's notice for no particular reason (e.g. Chicago freeways where everyone is doing 70 mph bumper-to-bumper and decreases to 10 mph all of a sudden).

Indeed, when someone changes lanes in front of me, I gently let off the accelerator, but as someone else noticed, that can enrage drivers behind me (I don't take it personally), and I'm definitely traveling fast enough to remain in the middle lanes.

Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

#152

Post by morkalork »

Sharlin wrote: post #36
advisedwang wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance is thinking about hard braking as an indicator of a driver with riskier behaviour. Google is showing that it can also be an indicator of risky road designs. These actually kind of point in opposite directions in terms of the causes of hard braking. The certainly can be used in different ways.

Some road designs are risky because they encourage risky behavior. And "risky" is relative. A good driver should recognize risky road segments and drive even more defensively than normally.

There's some that are purely due to space constraints, favourite pet-peeve example is a highway with an overpass crossing it.

In the rural case, the offramp will branch off first and the on ramp will be after the overpass and the drivers taking each never meet.

In the space constrained case, theres one extra lane that serves both, where the drivers taking the on-ramp cross paths with those taking the off ramp. This configuration is absolutely cursed!

Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

#154

Post by adrianmonk »

OK, now that you have this data, give me a "prefer safer routes" option in Google Maps navigation!

While you're at it, give me an option to avoid unprotected left turns and to avoid making a left turn across a busy road where cross traffic does not stop. (But only during heavy traffic; it's fine when nobody is on the road.) Not only are these more dangerous, they're also more stressful and they also introduce annoying variation into my travel time.

Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

#155

Post by sershe »

mountain_peak wrote: post #46
presidentender wrote: post #20

I got one of those dongles from my insurance company that plugged into the ODB2 port and reported my driving habits. I was a bad driver. It would frequently beep at me to let me know that I had braked too hard. I was mystified. "What should I have done differently," I'd think, as I raged at the objective machine that judged me so. The next time my brother came to visit, he called mom. "Oh, and presidentender is a goo…

Maintaining a safe following distance is incredibly challenging on busy freeways where hard braking is often 'required'. Most people have likely found themselves in this situation: vehicle changes lanes in front of you; you slow down to maintain a safe following distance, another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you. Repeat for your entire commute. Incredibly frustrating, and I've driven all over North Am…

The most frustrated people are those behind you, and if I was id soon be another person merging in front of you. If people are constantly merging in front of you, either everyone is going too fast or you are going too slow :)

Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

#156

Post by kazinator »

Hard braking could be detected externally; you can tell when vehicles are braking hard from the deceleration and suspension effects, without any surveillance equipment installed in them.

That's not gonna be something Google would research, of course, due to next to no alignment with their interests.

Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

#157

Post by ErroneousBosh »

yial wrote: post #65
ARandomerDude wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why hasn't gamification of safe driving habits been built directly into the car itself before now? I am so glad it hasn't. Data point of one, but gamification now has the opposite effect on me: it's such a well-worn pattern that it just annoys me. It was great when it was novel. I wonder how many others feel the same but without sampling it's hard to know.

I concur with you regarding gamification. When I am aware of the gamification it fills me with exhaustion to annoyance to extreme frustration. This is especially true of things that I want to use for one purpose. I also think some of the car sensors (Subaru especially) that are trying to make you safer are notoriously bad. I also find the random “coffee break” notice on Subarus frustrating. My personal examples: “eye…

I drove one of our Kia Niro EVs that we have at work recently, and it started warning me to take a break about fifteen minutes into the drive.

I'd barely left the yard, certainly hadn't made it across town.

It went off when I actually did stop for a coffee, but went on again 15 minutes after I left the car park.

I have to say its various combinations of bings and bongs and beeps were about the most distracting thing I've ever experienced in a vehicle.

Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

#158

Post by refulgentis »

bell-cot wrote: post #133
sagarm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think highway driving requires hard braking, you're a bad driver.

Or stuck on a highway with bad drivers. My local paper's current "bleeds => leads" story is about a head-on highway crash, between a big pickup truck and a wrong-way driver. Less that 4 hours after being posted, that story has already slipped off the front page.

I'm not sure the article, the article being off the front page now, or driving with bad drivers has anything to do with it.

The article stuff definitely doesn't.

Driving with bad drivers should incentivize you to follow less closely and require less hard braking, not more.

There's a motte where some poor fellow is always maintaining the car-length-for-every-10-mph rule and yet keeps being passed inside that distance by innumerable bad drivers the fellow is surrounded by.

I pity that fellow.

He has an excuse.

He also isn't observably real in any of my 21 years of driving in Buffalo, Boston, and Los Angeles.

I feel harsh for saying this, I am only saying it because A) this subthread is specifically about there isn't an excuse B) this stuff involves our lives. Thus, this is an appropriate venue because the people in the venue know what to expect, and poking at someone's thoughts on it may help them immeasurably.

Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

#159

Post by dheera »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #78
mountain_peak wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a safe following distance is incredibly challenging on busy freeways where hard braking is often 'required'. Most people have likely found themselves in this situation: vehicle changes lanes in front of you; you slow down to maintain a safe following distance, another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you. Repeat for your entire commute. Incredibly frustrating, and I've driven all over North Am…

Okay I'm thinking of a very Shenzen kind of gizmo for your car that projects a bright red laser "keep out" box on the road in front of your car which is adjusted in size for your current speed.

There was a bike light that projects a bike lane onto the road, not sure why they are not more popular.

Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

#160

Post by SLWW »

presidentender wrote: post #20

I got one of those dongles from my insurance company that plugged into the ODB2 port and reported my driving habits. I was a bad driver. It would frequently beep at me to let me know that I had braked too hard. I was mystified. "What should I have done differently," I'd think, as I raged at the objective machine that judged me so. The next time my brother came to visit, he called mom. "Oh, and presidentender is a goo…

While i find everything about this post thoroughly dystopian; I will state that I don't break harshly, just about ever, my car still has it's original breakpads (they still have some life, about a cm and a half to two) and it had 107k on the odo. Never been in an accident outside of getting break-checked by an insurance scammer when I was 19, and a head on when i was stopped at a stop sign.

Although I keep a varying follow distance, if there is an open lane immediately adjacent to me, I don't care if i'm tailing someone a bit, but if I'm boxed then you better believe it's 6+ car distance.

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