Sponsored Content

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.

Defining Harsh Events

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.

What are harsh events?

Harsh events detect sudden changes in vehicle movement and provide critical insights into driving behaviors. 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 this data's primary source and processor, 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.

Types of Harsh Events in the Altitude Platform

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:

1. Harsh Acceleration

Detected when a vehicle accelerates more quickly than usual.

2. Harsh Braking

Occurs when a vehicle decelerates abruptly, often indicating a sudden stop.

3. 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.

Transforming Highway Safety Through Harsh Event Data Analysis

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.

Unpacking the Capabilities of Altitude’s Harsh Events API

What sets the Altitude platform apart is its ability to analyze harsh event data across various dimensions. Users can study harsh braking, acceleration, and cornering events by road segment, vehicle class, or vocation to gain a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of safety issues. This granular approach allows transportation planners to tailor their strategies effectively, setting up projects for success and ultimately protecting motorists. By identifying patterns and hotspots of harsh events, your organization can make data-driven decisions about where to focus safety improvements, how to design better road infrastructure, and even how to build driver education programs.

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About the Sponsor: Geotab

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Altitude by Geotab is a leading provider of advanced mobility insights and solutions for public and commercial sectors across North America. Altitude by Geotab leverages its expertise in data analytics to help decision-makers gain a comprehensive understanding of road network movements. By delivering reliable and contextualized insights, it enables improved planning capabilities and better financial outcomes, while prioritizing data confidentiality and privacy.


About the Author

Andrew Forest is the Content Marketing Manager, Public Sector/Altitude by Geotab

May 2, 2025