There are only two conditions under which I have had to hard brake in more than 30 years of driving:
1. I'm on a race track or back road enjoying curves
2. Some asshole did something stupid in front of me.
I agree that hard braking is an accurate metric for road segment crash risk, but what I find upsetting is that insurance companies that use vehicle data treat /all/ hard braking equally. In reality, the risk is caused not by every person who hard brakes, but by the first person in a line of cars that hard brakes.
More on #2 above is that my observation has been MOST of the time, the braking was COMPLETELY unnecessary. Often the person hard braking that starts the chain has absolutely nothing in front of them to the horizon and is probably on their phone watching TikTok, suddenly looked up and realized they were driving and braked as a spooking reaction. This happens, observably, so often that there are active conspiracies on the Internet that the government hires people to drive like assholes to cause traffic. Obviously that's complete bunk, but my observation here is certainly not unique.
Rather than spying on everyone using our vehicle data to charge us ever more money (I've had zero at-fault accidents in nearly 30 years of driving, but my rates only go up), maybe we should enforce attentiveness on the road and start punishing those who are left-lane hogs (causing many lane changes, which are also risky), on their phone, or drunk. It's really obscene these days driving on American roads, it seems like everyone drives markedly worse since the pandemic /and/ enforcement has gone to nothing. The only time I see people get pulled over now is in speedtrap small towns.
1. I'm on a race track or back road enjoying curves 2. Some asshole did something stupid in front of me.
I agree that hard braking is an accurate metric for road segment crash risk, but what I find upsetting is that insurance companies that use vehicle data treat /all/ hard braking equally. In reality, the risk is caused not by every person who hard brakes, but by the first person in a line of cars that hard brakes.
More on #2 above is that my observation has been MOST of the time, the braking was COMPLETELY unnecessary. Often the person hard braking that starts the chain has absolutely nothing in front of them to the horizon and is probably on their phone watching TikTok, suddenly looked up and realized they were driving and braked as a spooking reaction. This happens, observably, so often that there are active conspiracies on the Internet that the government hires people to drive like assholes to cause traffic. Obviously that's complete bunk, but my observation here is certainly not unique.
Rather than spying on everyone using our vehicle data to charge us ever more money (I've had zero at-fault accidents in nearly 30 years of driving, but my rates only go up), maybe we should enforce attentiveness on the road and start punishing those who are left-lane hogs (causing many lane changes, which are also risky), on their phone, or drunk. It's really obscene these days driving on American roads, it seems like everyone drives markedly worse since the pandemic /and/ enforcement has gone to nothing. The only time I see people get pulled over now is in speedtrap small towns.