2026-08-19 04:00 UTCOriginal source2 min readUpdated: 2026-08-19 08:49 UTC

Proactive Road Safety Intervention in Australia: Predicting Risky Driving Hotspots from Connected Vehicle Data

arXiv:2608.16913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Road safety monitoring has historically been reactive, relying on crash-record analysis after fatalities and injuries have already occurred. Proactive identification of high-risk locations and dangerous driving behaviour before incidents occur is a critical but underexplored challenge. This paper addresses this gap using connected vehicle telemetry data from Greater Sydney, Australia, to detect and forecast near-miss risky driving events at the Local Government Area (LGA) level. Risky driving is quantified through g-force thresholds (hard braking >0.6g, harsh cornering >0.47g, harsh acceleration >0.5g), and spatio-temporal heatmaps are constructed to identify high-risk zones. Eight predictive models are benchmarked across three families: ensemble learning (Random Forests, XGBoost, LightGBM), deep learning (LSTM, N-BEATS), and classical time-series methods (ARIMA, Exponential Smoothing, Prophet). ARIMA achieves the lowest mean absolute error (MAE: 162.21), performing comparably to LSTM (MAE: 163.92) and outperforming all ensemble methods, with N-BEATS reaching an MAE of 180.75. These results demonstrate that parsimonious time-series models are competitive with deep learning approaches when training data volume is limited. The study highlights the potential of IoT-based connected vehicle data to support proactive road safety interventions, with Sydney's inner and western LGAs (CBD, Parramatta, Bankstown) identified as persistent high-risk zones warranting targeted policy action.

SourcearXiv Machine LearningAuthor: Adriana-Simona Mih\u{a}i\c{t}\u{a}, Clarence Cheung, Artur Grigorev, Tuo Mao, David Lillo-Trynes

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[Submitted on 15 Jul 2026]

Title:Proactive Road Safety Intervention in Australia: Predicting Risky Driving Hotspots from Connected Vehicle Data

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Abstract:Road safety monitoring has historically been reactive, relying on crash-record analysis after fatalities and injuries have already occurred. Proactive identification of high-risk locations and dangerous driving behaviour before incidents occur is a critical but underexplored challenge. This paper addresses this gap using connected vehicle telemetry data from Greater Sydney, Australia, to detect and forecast near-miss risky driving events at the Local Government Area (LGA) level. Risky driving is quantified through g-force thresholds (hard braking >0.6g, harsh cornering >0.47g, harsh acceleration >0.5g), and spatio-temporal heatmaps are constructed to identify high-risk zones. Eight predictive models are benchmarked across three families: ensemble learning (Random Forests, XGBoost, LightGBM), deep learning (LSTM, N-BEATS), and classical time-series methods (ARIMA, Exponential Smoothing, Prophet). ARIMA achieves the lowest mean absolute error (MAE: 162.21), performing comparably to LSTM (MAE: 163.92) and outperforming all ensemble methods, with N-BEATS reaching an MAE of 180.75. These results demonstrate that parsimonious time-series models are competitive with deep learning approaches when training data volume is limited. The study highlights the potential of IoT-based connected vehicle data to support proactive road safety interventions, with Sydney's inner and western LGAs (CBD, Parramatta, Bankstown) identified as persistent high-risk zones warranting targeted policy action.

Comments: 15 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, Submitted to the ATRF 2026 Conference to take place in November 2026 Sydney, Australia

Subjects:

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computers and Society (cs.CY)

Cite as: arXiv:2608.16913 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.16913v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.16913

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Journal reference: 47th Australasian Transport Research Forum 24 to 26 November 2026, Sydney, Australia

Submission history

From: Adriana-Simona Mihaita Dr. [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Jul 2026 06:34:53 UTC (595 KB)

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