Advancing highway safety with insights from Altitude's Harsh Events capability

With advancements in technology, our roads and vehicles are reaching new heights of intelligence and safety. Yet an often overlooked aspect merits closer examination: The critical dynamics behind every sharp turn, sudden stop or rapid acceleration. These incidents, known as harsh events, are more than mere driving reactions; they offer insights into driving behavior and their impact on road safety.

Have you ever wondered what driving habits say about overall road and highway safety? Understanding harsh events—sudden actions like sharp braking or abrupt turns—is key to uncovering safety insights. These moments offer vital data, shedding light on how drivers and vehicles respond to the road and pointing the way to safer, smarter driving.

Harsh events provide critical insights into driving behaviors by detecting sudden changes in vehicle movement. In the Altitude platform, our Harsh Events capability leverages commercial vehicle mobility data, not just GPS, to analyze harsh braking, acceleration and cornering at a granular, road-segment level.

As the primary source and processor of this data, we apply advanced processing pipelines to detect when vehicle movements exceed set thresholds, maintaining greater accuracy and context. This includes segmentation by vehicle type, class, vocation and industry, offering insights unavailable on other platforms.

These allow for precise detection that helps transportation planners and safety agencies identify high-risk areas and improve road safety initiatives.

The Altitude platform identifies and categorizes harsh driving events. It provides detection and analysis of various driving risks by leveraging GPS data and providing comprehensive API capabilities.

Harsh events are categorized into three main types:

• Harsh Acceleration: Detected when a vehicle accelerates more quickly than usual.
• Harsh Braking: Occurs when a vehicle decelerates abruptly, often indicating a sudden stop.
• Harsh Cornering: Registered when a vehicle takes a turn too sharply, potentially losing steering control or stability.

Harsh events are identified in our platform using GPS data and commercial transportation insights to measure how quickly a vehicle accelerates or decelerates. When this rate of change exceeds a specific threshold, a harsh event is recorded. These insights enable you to better assess the risks linked to highways and regional safety as a whole.

The platform accurately detects and classifies harsh events by privatizing, aggregating and then analyzing these insights. Its API gives you the ability to study all three types of harsh events down to the road segment level. Users can filter these findings based on vocation, industry and vehicle class to gain detailed insights for more tailored safety strategies that improve overall highway and road network safety.

Analyzing harsh event data helps transportation planners improve highway safety by identifying dangerous driving behaviors and high-risk road segments. These insights enable you to develop targeted policies and infrastructure improvements, such as stricter enforcement in high-risk areas, driver awareness campaigns, optimized traffic signals and enhanced route planning. Quick responses to detected patterns, improved traffic flow and redesigned intersections or curves contribute to fewer collisions and safer roads.

Transportation planners can identify and address various highway safety concerns by examining specific types of harsh events. Here are five key examples of how the Harsh Events capability can be used:

1. Pinpointing high-risk highway segments: Harsh event data helps planners pinpoint road segments with frequent aggressive acceleration, enabling targeted safety interventions. These may include focused education campaigns on the dangers of rapid speeding, incentive programs for safe driving and stricter enforcement of traffic laws in high-risk areas. Using data to guide these efforts, planners can effectively promote safer driving habits and reduce dangerous behaviors on highways.
2. Reducing severe bottlenecks: Severe bottlenecks on highways contribute to congestion and increased collision risks. The NHTSA reports that rear-end collisions account for nearly 30% of all crashes, often involving harsh braking and tailgating. Bottlenecked traffic leads to abrupt decelerations, which can trigger chain reactions and cause additional incidents to occur. Understanding harsh acceleration and deceleration patterns is crucial for optimizing traffic flow. Implementing adaptive traffic management systems can help reduce stop-and-go traffic, minimizing abrupt braking. By smoothing traffic flow and easing bottlenecks, highway authorities can enhance safety, decrease incidents and improve driving conditions, making highways safer and more efficient.
3. Infrastructure planning for improved highway safety: Infrastructure planning is vital for enhancing highway safety and mitigating dangerous driving behaviors through strategic design and improvements. Transportation planners can focus on measures like installing rumble strips and dynamic speed displays in areas identified as hotspots for harsh acceleration. These changes alert drivers to slow down, reducing the likelihood of dangerous acceleration. Improved signage is also crucial for highway safety; enhancing highway signs with clear warnings about speeding and acceleration provides drivers with essential information to adjust their behavior accordingly. Redesigning highway layouts to include variable speed limits can discourage fast acceleration and speeding, promoting a safer driving environment.
4. Improving intersection and highway angles: Harsh cornering event data identifies dangerous spots where drivers frequently take sharp turns too quickly, allowing transportation planners to pinpoint high-risk areas and understand drivers’ struggles. This information guides targeted improvements, such as adding prominent warning signs or redesigning problematic road segments. Roads can be rebuilt in mountainous regions with gentler turns or more visible paths. Other solutions include realigning lanes for smoother navigation or installing warning systems before sharp curves. By implementing these data-driven changes, planners can significantly reduce collision risks and improve the driving experience on highways and at intersections.
5. Enhanced highway route planning: Harsh event data helps identify highway areas prone to risky driving behaviors. This information allows planners to address high-risk segments through improved signage, visibility or lane adjustments. The data also enables smarter traffic management systems, allowing real-time adjustments based on current conditions. This approach reduces congestion and abrupt stops, leading to safer and more efficient travel. Optimized routes can avoid dangerous areas by continuously updating route planning to enhance highway safety and efficiency.

Before a warehouse facility opens, trucks typically want to try to be among first in line for staging. This enables them to get on the road quicker and make faster progress toward their destinations. Mobility insights can help outline the entire process, from staging to where commercial vehicles are frequently headed, showing how drayage trucks typically move product. Transportation analytics provide vital insight into how supply chains disperse out from central ports or distribution centers and snake throughout a region. Warehousing and logistics companies can use insights like these to identify staging and parking inefficiencies and develop effective solutions for them.

Example: An analysis of the George Washington Bridge conducted with Altitude’s Harsh Events insights during severe winter weather conditions. This snapshot shows how dangerous driving events trended during peak times. Read “Bridging the Data Gap: Commercial Freight Insights from Five Key U.S. Bridges” to learn more.

Example: Harsh driving patterns observed along Interstate 90 in upstate New York during strong winter storms (compared to baseline numbers). Read “The Road to Recovery: Transportation Insights for Understanding and Rebuilding After Extreme Weather” for more Harsh Events insights.

Altitude’s Harsh Events API, with its ability to distinguish harsh driving events by vehicle class or vocation, offers significant advantages:

• Enables tailored safety measures and risk reduction strategies
• Improves regional transportation management through targeted training and optimized route planning
• Informs better road design and traffic management
• Supports predictive analyses for anticipating safety risks

This comprehensive approach makes the API invaluable for enhancing road safety, fleet management and sustainable transportation planning.

The Altitude platform and the Harsh Events API provide transportation and urban planners and safety officials with powerful tools to bolster road safety proactively. Planners can implement targeted interventions and improve road safety by leveraging granular insights into harsh braking, acceleration and cornering events. 

Harsh events data allows for detailed monitoring and analysis of driving behaviors across road segments, vehicle classes and vocations. For example, transportation officials can use these insights to identify specific highway stretches where truck drivers frequently use harsh braking. This insight might lead to installing improved signage, adjustments to speed limits or targeted education campaigns for commercial drivers in that area.

By pinpointing high-risk areas precisely, planners can allocate resources more effectively, focusing on the segments needing attention. This data-driven approach fuels safety interventions tailored to address each location’s issues.

The Harsh Events API lets planners analyze the relationships between harsh driving events and actual incidents. For instance, your organization might discover a strong correlation between frequent harsh cornering events and increased collisions at a particular intersection.

By understanding these correlations, officials can predict potential collision hotspots and implement preventive measures. These could involve redesigning problematic intersections, adjusting traffic signal timing or implementing driver awareness campaigns focused on safe cornering techniques in high-risk areas.

Transportation planners can develop sophisticated predictive models by leveraging historical data on harsh driving events and their outcomes. These models can help forecast potential safety issues before they result in incidents.

For example, if a predictive model identifies an emerging pattern of increased harsh acceleration events in a residential area, planners might proactively implement traffic calming measures, such as speed bumps or narrowed lanes. This forward-thinking approach allows officials to address safety concerns before they escalate into more serious problems.

Harsh event insights can be integrated into comprehensive transportation management systems, supporting holistic safety improvements that align with broader goals like environmental sustainability and operational efficiency.

For instance, planners might use harsh braking to identify areas where improved traffic flow could reduce stop-and-go traffic, enhancing safety and reducing emissions. Or, they could use harsh acceleration to optimize the placement of electric vehicle charging stations, encouraging smoother driving patterns while supporting the transition to cleaner, more cost-efficient transportation.

By incorporating these detailed safety insights into wider planning initiatives, transportation officials can create synergies between safety improvements and other urban development goals, leading to more resilient and livable communities.

Altitude’s Harsh Events API provides a powerful toolkit for proactive highway safety management. By harnessing these insights, you can make data-driven decisions that help enhance safety and contribute to more efficient, sustainable and user-friendly transportation networks.

Vision Zero, an ambitious initiative to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries, is transforming road safety worldwide. This approach believes that road collisions are preventable, not inevitable. By using smart design, education and enforcement, cities engaged in this initiative aim to make their streets safe for everyone.

The Harsh Events API from Altitude helps make Vision Zero a reality. City planners can use these insights to spot risky areas and improve road safety. They can create smarter plans for safer streets and highways with better data. As we strive towards a future with zero traffic-related fatalities, leveraging such advanced analytics will be key to implementing targeted interventions and realizing the Vision Zero mission.

Harsh events provide invaluable insights into driving behaviors and road safety, offering a powerful tool for transportation planners and safety officials. We can create more targeted interventions, predictive models and comprehensive safety strategies by leveraging this information through platforms like Altitude’s Harsh Events API. As we move toward a Vision Zero future, the intelligent use of transportation analytics will be crucial in shaping safer, more efficient and sustainable road networks for all.