Google Maps is definitely one of the technically coolest big tech products imo. It's fascinating what kind of non-obvious insights you can get from the combined user data (E.g. Crowdedness of public places, insights like in the article etc.)
Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
421–430 of 577 posts
Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
#422Nice money they can made selling to insurers the collected data on who drives frequently on those road segments with high risk.
There's even no need to get the real names! To anonymously load person's risk coefficient, it's enough to ask to log in using Google account when buying insurance.
Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand perfectly, 20 years driving, I think people just don't like that the safe answer is to be slow. You will not fix others behaviour, so your options are be slow and generous, get out of the chaotic lanes (unless that's all of them), or join them and be aggressive, claim space, be stressed and annoyed your whole trip. There is no solution to traffic here sorry, this is more about managing your own frustrati…
The issue is that when you slow down, you’re (a) creating ‘turbulence’ in the traffic flow with increased speed differential between cars and increased lane changes, which increases accident risk for everybody, and (b) it’s not even solving the problem because you still perpetually have some impatient driver wedging themself in directly in front of you, deleting your buffer zone. It’s safer to drive a little closer,…
Hard disagree. It is not safer to ignore your safety buffer. It is certainly not safer to defend your buffer.
If traffic is very busy, the trick is to just accept people will wedge in front of you and keep going slightly smaller each time to increase the buffer again. You might create 'turbulence', which might possibly decrease the safety a bit for all the impatient drivers doing the wedging. But it increases your own safety. And therefore also that of the people following you and your passengers.
I'm also not convinced on the 'turbulence' part. Keeping a buffer smoothes out any sudden speed variations of the people in front of you, which makes the traffic behind you flow better.
And it might maybe feel a lot slower to let a 100 cars go in front of you on your commute, but just driving 99km/h when the person in front of you does 100 is enough to increase your gap and it makes a whopping 1% of difference.
The only thing is: sometimes a road is just too busy and the space for a buffer just isn't there to begin with. At that point the speeds should go down to accommodate the smaller buffers, which is actually what happens here in the netherlands as long as there aren't too many people ignoring the speeds advisory boards above the highway.
Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you're understanding. The point is that 20 people in a row will take advantage of your buffer to slow you down again and again and again, which makes you get to your destination later... because they're being selfish to get somewhere faster, and you're not so you get to where you're going slower . We're not talking about where they're changing lanes to take the next exit. We're talking about where your…
If you actually want the safest option then you should merge all the way right and keep slowing down. Noone is going to merge right if they are trying to go faster, they will only do it to get off the offramp. Meaning the gap will reopen as people exit through the offramp or merge left into faster lanes. If you choose to go in the fastlane in traffic you should understand that it will have people who do not care abou…
> Noone is going to merge right if they are trying to go faster
In my experience even cars that are not trying to go faster will happily merge in front of you unsafely all the time, just because they don't understand the concept of a safe distance.
Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand perfectly, 20 years driving, I think people just don't like that the safe answer is to be slow. You will not fix others behaviour, so your options are be slow and generous, get out of the chaotic lanes (unless that's all of them), or join them and be aggressive, claim space, be stressed and annoyed your whole trip. There is no solution to traffic here sorry, this is more about managing your own frustrati…
It is more dangerous to be slow and have people constantly merging in front of you, rather than be slightly faster and not have all the merging. Accidents happen when vehicles are going different speeds, all things equal.
You might be a bad driver and not even know it.
Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But you’re not getting slower and slower for every car. Lets say 100 cars pull in front of you, and let’s be say each car adds 5 metres of space, so you have 500 metres of ‘lost’ space to regain. At 30 mph how much later will you be? 37 seconds. I’ll take that trade.
> let’s be say each car adds 5 metres of space
At over 100 km/h that would be ideally 5m for a car and 70m for a safe distance between each one so 7,5km, which is 4.5 minutes at 100 km/h or 9 minutes at 30 mph.
Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
#427I 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…
> another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you
Usually if you maintain the slightly slower speed you had to maintain a safe following distance it doesn't matter, as the distance will either increase or they'll leave for another lane. You have to get used to drivers doing messy things in front of you, but at a safe distance. When doing this you are in fact helping the traffic becoming more fluid.
Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
#428Aim 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 "…
Of course braking/change in velocity creates waves. But this effect is overemphasized in my opinion. Locally analyzed, traffic can be simplified incredibly by observing that a lane's maximum throughput is simply given by following spacing, measured in time. If drivers are using a 2 second following distance, commonly taught in driving school, then max throughput is simply 1 car / 2 sec If you double following distanc…
> If you double following distance, you halve the throughput. If you halve following distance, you double your throughput.
That postulate breaks down as soon as you move away from a laminar traffic assumption and include distracted drivers, lane changes, and weather influences. Which is why the wave theory model is important to understand the propagation of perturbations and their effect on maximum throughput.
> The throughput of a (full, i.e. rush-hour) road has nothing to do with speeds of people driving, and everything to do with following distance.
And yet, in the limit case of a bumper-to-bumper situation (or, in fluid dynamics parlance, an incompressible flow), the variable determining the change in mass flow-rate is the velocity of the medium. Mimetically, we could also look at ants. To ease congestion in a bumper-to-bumper situation, they accelerate.
Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
#429I 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…
I find that respect for safe following distance varies quite a lot amongst the places I've driven.
E.g.
- Switzerland and (somewhat surprisingly) UK: pretty good, people doing idiotic shit is rare enough that I'll usually comment on it if there's another person is in the car. If someone is riding my ass I'll make the effort to try and shake them off.
- Italy and Spain: horrifying, impossible to relax at all on the highway, having someone 2 car lengths off your rear bumper is the default condition.
- France and USA: somewhere in the middle where there are a lot of idiots but they are still the minority.
Subjectively, the USA feels much more sketchy because the rules are so much looser around overtaking.
Re: Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
#430I 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?
Euro NCAP actually mandates that a following distance should be part of adaptive cruise control. A lot of manufacturers have turned this into a distance meter on the dash, in addition to the automatic braking. When I test-drove a Renault 5. I could see a little bar graph measuring how close I was to what the car thought was safe. Which turned out to be a lot closer than I would be comfortable driving! That is, the car would have allowed me to get much closer before it would have activated any automatic braking.
(the irony of looking at a meter on the dash to duplicate a piece of information I should be very clearly seeing out of the windscreen was not lost on me, though)