Google is measuring where on the road most hard braking events happen.
Insurers measure who is having the most hard braking events.
Fuck all of that.
Similarly, people often don't like it when insurers track and score their driving. However, this allows insurers to offer lower insurance fees to more people by _not_ offering lower insurance fees (or instead charging higher fees) to people that are driving in a risky manner. This does of course assume a competitive market for insurance but I think in most countries that's a reasonable assumption.
There's nothing fairer than user-pays, especially when users can choose to pay less by changing their behavior.
If user pays is so fair why does anyone who could access credit or liquid assets in excess of their state's minimums have to pay hundreds to thousands per year for auto insurance?
It's relatively unknown for individuals because most people have no desire to lock up tens or hundreds of thousands of spare dollars just to avoid car insurance. As far as I'm aware it's primarily used by rich collectors who need to insure large collections that don't fit more traditional insurance profiles. Much more useful for businesses.
That's BS on it's face. Most states don't allow it or they restrict it to big business and government agencies.
>because most people have no desire to lock up tens or hundreds of thousands of spare dollars just to avoid car insurance.
Most people's money isn't making a return greater than what insurance would cost them.
Second, this completely ignores my point about credit. I can easily get hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit secured against my house or tens of thousands in unsecured credit (credit card). Why must I pay to keep the lights on at some insurance firm?
And I'm not particularly rich. If the numbers pencil out for me then surely they must pencil out for millions of people.
Note that you _are_ legally required to pay your annual ACC levies, which fund no-fault cover for injuries. However that doesn't cover property damage.
Example: open space on either side of the road, tends to encourage people to drive faster.
Closing that space (whether by buildings, shrubbery, etc ) will slow the speed.
But I will say there are also “obvious” bad designs - the rare far to short on ramp to merge, where drivers don’t understand how to adjust.
Or the one I most frequently encounter are “blind spots” created by the speed of an intersecting road, where a mirror may be attached to a pole / tree, or a sign reminding people to look left right left, or even instructing where cars should be beyond for a safe pull out.
I know of one intersection near me that both has markers on the road(don’t pull out if cars are at or beyond this marker), and a reminder about looking, but still has a high frequency of accidents.
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!
The cause of hard braking isn’t mutually exclusive: bad driving or bad road design.
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 slow traffic.
That second one gets lots of otherwise good drivers. They seem to think that by limiting their speed vs slow/stopped traffic they'd be encouraging people to dart in front of them. Which is somewhat true. But with limited speed, that's an avoidable or less injurious accident. By gunning it past stopped traffic, you make the accident unavoidable and more serious.
Inb4 deaths per mile driven, I'd argue higher VMT in the U.S.A. only proves the point - too many cars being driven too much because of silly land use. High VMT is acutally a symptom of a dangerous mobility system as much as a cause.
I (an American) was on holiday and Switzerland and was explained the process of getting your license back if you lose it. It is a big disincentive to driving badly and putting yourself at risk of that, to be sure.
Yes, in a country where safe driving is not internalized you will inevitable have someone rear-ending you while doing this, but if the options are "accident where you're at fault" and "accident where you're not at fault", pick the latter.
People don’t usually act erratically for no reason. Maybe they suddenly stop because they see a deer sprinting towards the road off in the distance, and the person behind them didn’t see it. There are tons of reasons that look like they “erratically stop”, which are actually genuine safe behavior that the other may not know about.
But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.
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 brake pedal.
The hard braking heuristic makes sense when estimating risk of road segments, but not as a proxy for driver competence.
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.
Then use it? Mandate reaction speed tests or other driving mechanics competency evaluation (not road sign comprehension) and watch insurance margins explode.
The driver in my example did poorly and scored top marks in the heuristic.
> building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.
The cam car did not need to have a hard braking event (HBE) to start building distance.
Even if they did, the insurance companies are looking for a pattern of HBEs to assess risk. I agree that there is a theoretical high-risk driver that never has a HBE because they always try to maneuver instead of breaking. There are other heuristics for this (high lateral acceleration, high jerk). And the ultimate heuristic: failing to avoid accidents, thus having a claim history.
On any modern car, just push it all the way and let ABS and stability control figure it out, and don't let the vibrating brake pedal spook you into releasing it. That's just ABS doing its thing.
Really though, getting a license is too easy in the USA. We really need to require some sort of car control course, including obstacle avoidance in the rain. Would be really nice too if it included an obstacle avoidance course in two cars: A huge SUV or pick-up truck and a more reasonably sized sedan. So many drivers think they need a huge vehicle to be safe while being completely unaware of how well smaller cars can likely avoid the crashes to begin with. Would probably get really expensive really quickly, though.
I realize this may come off as victim blaming, but I feel you should have an obligation to not endanger yourself even if by the laws of the road you are technically in the right. I would rather get cut off by and idiot and be at my destination thirty seconds later than having to deal with car repairs even when it is legally speaking not my fault.
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.
Much of being a good driver is just awareness.
One time my light turns green, I don't go. As my wife asks what I'm waiting for, a pickup blows the light. We weren't the first car at that light, and years later she still talks about how there's no way I could know. Well, I didn't get us t-boned at 80 so I must have done something right.
I do both and I am constantly surprised at the lack of situational awareness of drivers when I’m a passenger in their cars.
I think truckers probably get the same thing too.
First, the insurance company incurs costs just processing the claim. If things escalate with the other party, they may even incur legal and court costs.
Additionally, there are some costs that are incurred regardless of fault -- like personal injury protection.
Even defining "who was at fault" is a complicated situation. A lot of people presume that it is as simple as: whoever the police issues a citation to at the scene is 100% at fault. But that's not the way things actually work. The way liability is assigned depends on the state, but in a comparative negligence state you could be proportionately liable for as little as one percent of the fault of the accident. Maybe someone else ran a red light, you entered the intersection on green, and hit them. You could end up sharing some of the cost for that, if it is found that you could have avoided the accident but decided not to.
And even after all of this, if the other party runs out of money, doesn't have insurance, or runs away at the scene, your insurance company is stuck paying the costs under their uninsured/underinsurred motorist coverage.
It’s this obnoxious audio warning that tells me I had a hard breaking and it’s 9/10 because I stopped at a red light that I would not have made on yellow. And then it sends me tips and reminders about reducing hard breaking events and it’s annoying. I know they have done the analysis but it detects moderate hard breaking which is frustrating. One of those things that I am sure in net is positive but perhaps slices of the population it does not benefit.
Has this been studied in isolation? Many of the tools that notify upon hard braking also are used to impose financial penalties for doing so... I suspect people may be reacting to the financial incentives.
There is a minor financial aspect (price of fuel), but I’m far more interested in seeing if I can get a better “green score” at the end of the drive.
of course if they change such that they don't break hard when needed that is bad, but if the change such that they don't need to break hard in the first place because they slow down in places that are dangerious that is the point.
Yeah, if you want to do that, it would be helpful to know whether a financial incentive is required for the effect or not.
Is it that hard braking events are broadly indicative of surprises of lots of sorts, and so it happens that the only way to eliminate them all is to develop a full range of defensive driving habits?
More Goodhart's Law or Serenity Prayer?
It’s still out of the norm braking for my style of driver but from what I see on the road, people drive aggressively like this. Especially in the US.
... How do people not notice that they are braking hard?