Afraid the intuition is somewhat incorrect.

Similar to with tire wear what's important to emissions is the amount of force that has to be applied to decelerate and how often it occurs. At highway speeds it's far less of an issue, but in slow speed urban environments with lots of stop start driving and high vehicle densities it's a real problem.

See for instance https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat09/1...

Makes sense, good points.