The Harsh Truth: Segment-Level Analysis of Harsh Driving Events in Milan Using Large-Scale Telematics, Street Networks, and Google Street View

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: La Grotteria, Andrea, Santi, Paolo, Venverloo, Titus, Fugiglando, Umberto, Ratti, Carlo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author La Grotteria, Andrea
Santi, Paolo
Venverloo, Titus
Fugiglando, Umberto
Ratti, Carlo
author_facet La Grotteria, Andrea
Santi, Paolo
Venverloo, Titus
Fugiglando, Umberto
Ratti, Carlo
contents Police-reported crash statistics remain the standard input for urban road-safety assessment, but their incompleteness and reporting lag limit their usefulness for timely, fine-grained intervention design. Harsh acceleration and braking events are widely used as surrogate safety indicators, but have so far been studied only in comparatively small urban samples. This study analyses harsh events across the urban road network of Milan, combining high-resolution telematics from more than 4.2 million vehicles equipped with On-Board Units, segment-level traffic metrics from TomTom, street-network and infrastructure attributes from OpenStreetMap, and visual streetscape features extracted from Google Street View via semantic segmentation using a OneFormer model. We employ an analytical framework combining non-parametric Mann--Whitney U tests of segment-feature distributions between high- and low-harshness groups with supervised machine-learning regressors. We find that, once exposure is controlled for, wider carriageways, crossings and transit stops, and more open visual fields (higher sky- and road-pixel proportions) are associated with higher harsh-event intensity, while denser built frontage is associated with lower intensity. Finally, the cycling-infrastructure case study identifies a gradient in harsh-event intensity across facility types: markings-only cycle lanes are associated with a 19.5% higher harshness score, and mixed-traffic configurations with an 11.5% higher score, relative to physically separated cycle paths, conditional on the included controls. These results support context-specific rather than uniform urban-safety interventions and illustrate how large-scale telematics combined with open geospatial and visual data can inform Vision Zero decision-making at the metropolitan scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00261
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Harsh Truth: Segment-Level Analysis of Harsh Driving Events in Milan Using Large-Scale Telematics, Street Networks, and Google Street View
La Grotteria, Andrea
Santi, Paolo
Venverloo, Titus
Fugiglando, Umberto
Ratti, Carlo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Physics and Society
Police-reported crash statistics remain the standard input for urban road-safety assessment, but their incompleteness and reporting lag limit their usefulness for timely, fine-grained intervention design. Harsh acceleration and braking events are widely used as surrogate safety indicators, but have so far been studied only in comparatively small urban samples. This study analyses harsh events across the urban road network of Milan, combining high-resolution telematics from more than 4.2 million vehicles equipped with On-Board Units, segment-level traffic metrics from TomTom, street-network and infrastructure attributes from OpenStreetMap, and visual streetscape features extracted from Google Street View via semantic segmentation using a OneFormer model. We employ an analytical framework combining non-parametric Mann--Whitney U tests of segment-feature distributions between high- and low-harshness groups with supervised machine-learning regressors. We find that, once exposure is controlled for, wider carriageways, crossings and transit stops, and more open visual fields (higher sky- and road-pixel proportions) are associated with higher harsh-event intensity, while denser built frontage is associated with lower intensity. Finally, the cycling-infrastructure case study identifies a gradient in harsh-event intensity across facility types: markings-only cycle lanes are associated with a 19.5% higher harshness score, and mixed-traffic configurations with an 11.5% higher score, relative to physically separated cycle paths, conditional on the included controls. These results support context-specific rather than uniform urban-safety interventions and illustrate how large-scale telematics combined with open geospatial and visual data can inform Vision Zero decision-making at the metropolitan scale.
title The Harsh Truth: Segment-Level Analysis of Harsh Driving Events in Milan Using Large-Scale Telematics, Street Networks, and Google Street View
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00261