Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

research.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 577 posts

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

#31

Post by munificent »

harshaw wrote: post #2

Nice research. This is fairly well known in insurance circles. Most auto insurers that do telematics consider hard braking the strongest indicator of risk. One of the things that we do at work (Cambridge Mobile Telematics) is build tools to deal with this risk. We have apps that monitor driving and we play a tone to indicate that a hard braking event was detected. Simply letting people know that they had a hard braki…

How does one not already know that they had a hard braking event? Surely the jamming their foot on the brake pedal and the rapid deceleration would send an even more obvious signal than playing a chime?

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

#32

Post by organsnyder »

WarmWash wrote: post #29
pavel_lishin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mom had a device installed in her car to get a discount on her insurance, and she was always upset at the hard braking thing - whenever she did it, it was because another car was doing something unsafe that she couldn't control, like pulling out in front of her.

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.

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

#34

Post by socalgal2 »

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…

I'm always surprised at the number of people that follow too closely.

This always stuck with me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJFOTSYJrtw&t=466s

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

#35

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

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…

Is there any vehicle that uses it's sensors to make a gentle suggestion about following distance?

It's probably the best single thing anyone can do to improve safety. It also reduces wear-and-tear on your car, and increases your fuel economy as a side benefit.

Why hasn't gamification of safe driving habits been built directly into the car itself before now?

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

#36

Post by Sharlin »

advisedwang wrote: post #14
harshaw wrote: post #2

Nice research. This is fairly well known in insurance circles. Most auto insurers that do telematics consider hard braking the strongest indicator of risk. One of the things that we do at work (Cambridge Mobile Telematics) is build tools to deal with this risk. We have apps that monitor driving and we play a tone to indicate that a hard braking event was detected. Simply letting people know that they had a hard braki…

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.

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

#37

Post by drewda »

pixl97 wrote: post #8
drewda wrote: post #3

What is the actual use of this? This research team used Google's first-party location data to identify San Jose's Interstate 880/US 101 interchange as a site with statistically extreme amounts of hard braking by Android Auto users. But you don't need machine learning to know that... San Jose Mercury News readers voted that exact location as the worst interchange in the entire Bay Area in a 2018 reader poll [1] It's n…

>No doubt some state departments of transportation will line up to buy these new "insights" from Google (forgetting that they actually already buy similar products from TomTom, Inrix, StreetLight, et al.) [2] Google/Apple probably collect a massively larger amount of data than those other companies, putting those other companies at a risk of losing future revenue. Between Google and Apple pretty much every car in the…

Yeah, Google and Apple do probably have much more first-party probe data of passenger vehicles. But it really depends on the type of traffic data product. For some use-cases, it's more than sufficient for the vendor to buy probe data from specific types of fleet vehicles (like work trucks).

Where Google/Apple's coverage is quite valuable is for near-real-time speeds for atypical events -- say like yesterday's Super Bowl. But that's not what this blog post is about -- this post is about a well-established pattern that can be identified with historical datasets.

All that to say that vendors sell a wide variety of data products to transportation planners, but just because Google is now entering this niche market doesn't mean they'll be "the best" or even realize what their strengths are.

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

#38

Post by ominous_prime »

grog454 wrote: post #21
avidiax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some amount of that is inevitable, but there is another level of defensive driving where you anticipate poor behavior and arrange that it won't cause an accident. Have a look at a few dash cam accident videos [1]. There are many maladaptive patterns of behavior, but a frequent one that the average good driver can improve on is limiting speed on two occasions: when approaching a blind spot, and when passing stopped or…

The landing page video's first incident is a car coming from behind and from the right, cutting off the filming car. The filming car didn't react at all when instant (but measured) braking would've been safer to start building a distance buffer. One thing HPDE taught me is that most people under brake in dangerous situations because they simply don't know the limit of their vehicle nor the sensitivity range of the br…

It certainly makes sense as a proxy for competence across a diverse population for insurance purposes. You have a baseline of hard braking events that a competent driver may encounter under normal circumstances. If a driver routinely exceeds that number, they are either unable to correctly estimate closing distance and reaction times, which makes them higher risk for causing accidents, or they are driving abnormally aggressively, which also makes them a higher risk for causing accidents. If you consistently put yourself in situations where hard braking is required, it doesn't matter what your skill is, you've reduced your safety margins and an accident is statistically more probable. You said it correctly with "would've been safer to start building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.

35 years without an accident on my record isn't because I'm a magnificent driver, it's because I always try to leave a way out for when something unexpected happens, because the unexpected _does_ happen.

The fact that some people may have the skill to drive more aggressively means nothing in the aggregate as far as insurance companies are concerned. If you are skilled enough to drive in that manner, you are skilled enough to avoid it as well. It's simply statistics.

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

#39

Post by AngryData »

garaetjjte wrote: post #22
kube-system wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers often believe that their insurance rates should be based solely on whether they follow driving rules, but the risks to insurance are not isolated to this. Someone can follow every rule perfectly, but if they are involved in an accident they incur costs for their insurance company.

If they are not found at fault then indeed there's no cost for their insurance company?

It does cost them just to process the claim because the other guys side is unlikely to completely roll over if there is any chance to reduce the payout. Obviously its not as much as the claims themselves but it also isn't free.

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

#40

Post by mecsred »

munificent wrote: post #31
harshaw wrote: post #2

Nice research. This is fairly well known in insurance circles. Most auto insurers that do telematics consider hard braking the strongest indicator of risk. One of the things that we do at work (Cambridge Mobile Telematics) is build tools to deal with this risk. We have apps that monitor driving and we play a tone to indicate that a hard braking event was detected. Simply letting people know that they had a hard braki…

How does one not already know that they had a hard braking event? Surely the jamming their foot on the brake pedal and the rapid deceleration would send an even more obvious signal than playing a chime?

Obviously people know, but theres no impulse to introspect on why or how. Knowing that someone else knows you had a hard braking event taps in to our social brains to provide a much stronger response to the event. When we know people are watching we're more likely to try and justify our behaviour.
Post reply on HN