We prove effective equidistribution of horospherical flows in $\operatorname {SO}(n,1)^{\circ } / \Gamma $ when $\Gamma $ is geometrically finite and the frame flow is exponentially mixing for the Bowen–Margulis–Sullivan measure. We also discuss settings in which such an exponential mixing result is known to hold. As part of the proof, we show that the Patterson–Sullivan measure satisfies some friendly like properties when $\Gamma $ is geometrically finite.

We introduce two properties: strong R-property and $C(q)$ -property, describing a special way of divergence of nearby trajectories for an abstract measure-preserving system. We show that systems satisfying the strong R-property are disjoint (in the sense of Furstenberg) with systems satisfying the $C(q)$ -property. Moreover, we show that if $u_t$ is a unipotent flow on $G/\Gamma $ with $\Gamma $ irreducible, then $u_t$ satisfies the $C(q)$ -property provided that $u_t$ is not of the form $h_t\times \operatorname {id}$ , where $h_t$ is the classical horocycle flow. Finally, we show that the strong R-property holds for all (smooth) time changes of horocycle flows and non-trivial time changes of bounded-type Heisenberg nilflows.