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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

#461
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

Automatic braking is a last resort to prevent serious injury to the occupants. That's not the same as safe following distance with adaptive cruise control. The closest my Tesla will go at 60 kph is about 15 m (three car lengths for my Model S) I think. I'm not sure because I normally keep it at maximum separation, about three seconds (50 m at 60 kph).

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

#462

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 "…

THIS this so much. Look far out ahead and if you see traffic compressing then slow down sooner so as to try to make that compression vanish for those behind you.

The tradeoff for the compression 'vanishing' is longer times pressing your breaks, travelling slower overall, and leaving your engine running for more of the time.

Also you then just leave a bigger gap in front of you for somebody to jump into, forcing you to break more and go further back to maintain your distance. This in turn just winds up the drivers behind you who end up overtaking you. All this chaos becasue you think you are helping by 'reducing compression'.

In heavy traffic I much prefer to quickly catch the car in front up and then sit stationary with my engine off. Much more efficient and less polluting than spending the whole time with your ewngine on managing gaps and braking distances at low speeds.

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

#463
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the few things I really don't like about my Subbie is that it tries to help braking. I'm all in for traction control and to some extent ABS, but braking hard and upsetting the car's balance when you don't need it is dangerous.

Is it one of those cars that alters the brake boost depending on circumstances? That drives me nuts. When you put x amount of force into the brake pedal, you should know you're going to get y amount of deceleration. Don't double the brake boost just because you decided it's an emergency due to some opaque criteria.

I'm quite pleased to know that my Tesla S will assist me in braking when I stamp on the pedal. It's happened a couple of times and in both cases made sense and the car was under control all the time.

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

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what's your proposal? What should insurers be doing differently?

Operate like they did before they had access to surveillance technology that would have made Gestapo and Stasi blush

This. If you're nearly "perfectly" pricing risk on an individual level then you defeat the point of insurance which is to pool risk.

If my hypothetical cost over an N decade period is within a fraction of a percent of payouts in that time what do I gain by paying for insurance other than creating a principal-agent problem?

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

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it could suggest a less risky route and offer you a discount in exchange for taking that route instead.

Why can't Gooapple suggest this today?

It seems that they could, but don't.

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

#466
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of said data is tremendous, and could lead to great societal benefits if available for research. So much so that I would argue that google (et al) should be compelled to make the data publicly available. They have enough money, let's make society better.

They are making this data publicly available -- after aggregation and anonymization.

A fraction of the data they collect, to keep up appearances.

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

#467
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or “design cities to be less car centric so we can keep the antisocial drivers out of a car”. It's definitely a system issue.

Why jump to cities? Low speed traffic in cities is not the main location of car collisions. The main issue is highways and rural roads.

    The main issue is highways and rural roads.
Source? I'd wager most accidents happen where the most people are. Cities.

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

#468
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

American road laws are insane here. The law should be simple; you must be in the outside lane at all times unless you are overtaking, and once you're done overtaking, you should merge back into the outside lane. https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/overtaking.html

That's fine when traffic is light. At rush hour, all lanes are full and nobody is overtaking.

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

#469
post #421

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.)

What I find very interesting about it is how much data they have (and are able to collect).

I'm personally someone who is less worried about "privacy" for this sort of data. But I know lots of other people feel differently.

To me, this is a great example of the "greater good" for data sharing. But it is also a great example of responsible use of data.

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

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you choose to go in the fastlane in traffic you should understand that it will have people who do not care about the following distance as much and are just trying to go as fast as possible. It's not about choosing to go in the fast lane. It's about the fact that in heavy traffic, you have no idea which lane will be fastest, because they're all heavy and which one is fastest keeps switching. > I have found that…

This is a long thread of people talking past each other. The bottom line is simply this: if you want to drive with a larger-than-average following distance (call it whatever you want, a safety buffer, a "proper" following distance, the point is it is a distance less than the average following distance of the other drivers on the road) then you have to accept that you will not be able to drive at the same speed as the…

Not so. Keeping a constant distance from the car ahead means both cars are moving at the same speed. When a jerk cuts in, after a moment all 3 cars will be moving at the same speed.
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