alt Hacker NewsInsurance is thinking about hard braking as an indicator of a driver with riskier behaviour. Google is showing that it can also be an indicator of risky road designs. These actually kind of point in opposite directions in terms of the causes of hard braking. The certainly can be used in different ways.
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(Though for an insurer, it’s the same thing - whether you’re risky because you’re a bad driver or because you drive on poorly constructed roads or around other poor drivers is inconsequential to them)
Some road designs are risky because they encourage risky behavior. And "risky" is relative. A good driver should recognize risky road segments and drive even more defensively than normally.
A driver who frequents risky roads is a concern to insurers, just as a driver who has risky behaviors.
The cause of hard braking isn’t mutually exclusive: bad driving or bad road design.
Driving on bad roads is just as bad for insurance as a bad driver is.
They point in opposite directions because they’re not measuring the same things.
Google is measuring where on the road most hard braking events happen.
Insurers measure who is having the most hard braking events.