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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

#291

Post by crest »

rootusrootus wrote: post #274
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild to me how often the left lane is not the fastest lane. I've had times where the right lane ends up being the fastest. On I-5 near Woodburn, OR, it's 3 lanes. So many drivers, including truckers, will often stay out of the right lane entirely to avoid being caught up in traffic coming on/off. Meanwhile, the left lane is going 5 mph under the limit because there's a left-lane camper somewhere miles ahead. So…

> On I-5 near Woodburn, OR The section of I-5 between Portland and Salem is absolutely psychotic, and I have never been able to reason out exactly why . It consistently has a left lane jammed with angry people going at or below the speed limit, a fairly normal center lane filled with cruisers, and a mostly empty right lane with the occasional big rig and regular very-high-speed cars expressing their frustration with…

It's wild to me that it's allowed and accepted to overtake on the right on US highways.

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

#292

Post by crest »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #263
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild to me how often the left lane is not the fastest lane. I've had times where the right lane ends up being the fastest. On I-5 near Woodburn, OR, it's 3 lanes. So many drivers, including truckers, will often stay out of the right lane entirely to avoid being caught up in traffic coming on/off. Meanwhile, the left lane is going 5 mph under the limit because there's a left-lane camper somewhere miles ahead. So…

It's not the fastest often because it's oversubscribed and people do not understand that the car has a 3rd, mostly underuntilized, state of neither pedal depressed (ie "coasting") ... so they create cascading braking pileups ...

If everyone that had it turned adaptive cruise control sigh.

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

#293

Post by asdff »

OneOffAsk wrote: post #140

Aim to make the road laminar. Every time you hard brake, you're causing the milk jug to glug, making a ripple of entropy as momentum turns to heat from your brakes and those behind you, sometimes in perpetuity. I learned this while doing a 1.5hr daily commute in a Subaru with a clapped out manual transmission. I wanted to conserve energy shifting, but realized I was now participating in large choreographed dance of "…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M

This is the natural response of tapping the brakes for any slowdown: people naturally over compensating and chain reactions happening behind them. This video shows how stop and go traffic forms and snowballs with no real impetus beyond mis estimated follow distance.

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

#294

Post by mmooss »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #219
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> vehicle changes lanes in front of you; I will never understand why this is so rage-inducing for people. Changing lanes is a necessary part of navigating, even during busy traffic. People on an on-ramp will need to get in front of somebody . People needing to move back to the right because their exist is coming up will need to get in front of somebody . Your lane is not a birth right. Let people merge. > you slow do…

It's frustrating because someone is taking your safety buffer as their opportunity to travel faster. And it results in you having to travel slower and slower to maintain the gap that is constantly consumed, tragedy of the commons style, by opportunists.

That is a paranoid-survival oriented perspective.

> someone is taking your safety buffer as their opportunity to travel faster

Nobody is 'taking' something; we're all just sharing the road, and at little cost. People change lanes for many reasons, and sometimes to pass someone else and travel faster. That's what the left lane (if we're talking about the US) is for.

> results in you having to travel slower and slower to maintain the gap that is constantly consumed,

I understand the theory but that hasn't happened in my experience.

And even if five or ten cars got in front of you, how much distance is that? A random Internet site says the average midsize car is 16 feet; add 220 ft safe driving distance at 75 mph (says another random website), so let's say 240 ft per car x 10 cars is 2400 ft. In that extreme circumstance, it will cost you ~30 seconds.

It's self-fulfilling: If you act aggressively toward other drivers, they will respond in kind. If you treat them respectfully and politely, they act the same way toward you. People behave well and kindly, naturally. We are social creatures.

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

#295

Post by cucumber3732842 »

olyjohn wrote: post #216
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Letting a large fraction of the freeway cut in front of you will turn normal drivers behind you aggressive, or at least aggressive enough to go around you. There's a balance to be struck.

Oh no! Cars will go around you!

In your haste to be snide and look down your nose what you've ignored is that this interaction is not "free".

Traffic moving with an approximately constant following distance is safer than traffic where one element is constantly traveling under speed to build up a following distance and is slowly filtering to the back as traffic comes upon and then moves around it. If the lane people are pulling into for passing is traveling substantially faster than the traffic that is being queued up behind to be passed then some amount of the people pulling out to pass are necessarily going to do so aggressively or within thinner than "perfect world" margins.

Every thing drivers on the road must perform carries some inherent risk. That a bunch of traffic that would have not gone around you will have done so means that many otherwise unnecessary merges or lane changes and then lane changes back will have happened. Each one of these represents an opportunity for things to go wrong above whatever the baseline is.

What I am saying is not groundbreaking or rocket science and the fact that I have to spell it out in detail to an adversarial audience speaks volumes about this audience and the volumes it speaks are not positive.

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

#296

Post by cucumber3732842 »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #131
sagarm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. If people are constantly moving into your appropriate head way this is doubtless annoying but the correct response is allow yourself to decelerate slowly to re-open that space again, repeat as many times as necessary, even if it means a bunch of agros end up in front of you. Better for them to be in front where you can see them, than behind or to the side, were you can't.

This algorithm is garbage because it puts no value upon the danger cause by other traffic changing lanes when they would not have otherwise.

You're just going to wind up being approximately the slowest person on the road, which is fine if you're constantly trying to go slower to build space but this means that a bunch of traffic that would have not gone around you will do so. This ups the danger vs a steady flow less all these lane changes because every "thing" other people do is an opportunity to do it badly.

Kinda ironic when you consider that TFA was about detecting dangerous merge situations in the data.

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

#297

Post by CamperBob2 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #228
ryandrake wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society would have a lot fewer car accidents if we, collectively, could get over that "Oh no someone dared to get in front of me! " feeling.

We'd also avoid a lot of accidents if we stopped the people that are doing lane changes for position-jockeying and no other purpose. So it's bad to be mad while driving, but there's a lot of lane changes that deserve the ire. (It's a tiny fraction of drivers that get really bad, but a less tiny fraction of lane changes.)

How about you let the police do the enforcement, and focus on your own driving?

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

#298

Post by cucumber3732842 »

organsnyder wrote: post #32
WarmWash wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take a seasoned motorcycle rider and put them in one of those dashcam subs, they'll rip their hair out. Most people have near zero defensive driving skill, and view someone pulling out in front of them as "nothing I could have done", when the dashcam shows the offending driver showed 5 signs of pulling out ages before the accident occurred.

I'm definitely a better driver because of bicycling. You gain new skills when you know that you're going to come out the loser in almost every collision.

If you cycle and it doesn't make you a better driver (and pedestrian) you're probably a bad driver and a bad cyclist.

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

#299

Post by its_magic »

ssl-3 wrote: post #287
its_magic wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people in question weren't angrily following me. If that were the case, there's no need for any theatrics. The first weapon to be employed is a Middle Finger. If that proves ineffective, it's followed by a lugnut taken from a coffee can that I keep handy. If and when things get to that level, the person usually wises up quick and finds a new hobby. There are other tools available if the nutcase decides to escalat…

So just... let them go. It's easy to do. Escalation usually doesn't improve things, including for the person displaying the universal finger (or throwing the lug nut). You've got a choice: You can keep plodding along in your truck while you escalate and retaliate and get all grumpy and stuff, or just keep plodding along in your truck without any of that noise. The errant, instigating driver won't really learn anythin…

[flagged]

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

#300

Post by its_magic »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #290
its_magic wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people in question weren't angrily following me. If that were the case, there's no need for any theatrics. The first weapon to be employed is a Middle Finger. If that proves ineffective, it's followed by a lugnut taken from a coffee can that I keep handy. If and when things get to that level, the person usually wises up quick and finds a new hobby. There are other tools available if the nutcase decides to escalat…

> The first weapon to be employed is a Middle Finger. If that proves ineffective, it's followed by a lugnut taken from a coffee can that I keep handy. If and when things get to that level, the person usually wises up quick and finds a new hobby. There are other tools available if the nutcase decides to escalate further. I, uh, okay but I hope you realize that this is far more extreme than what the other person was su…

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