We study the radial part of sub-Riemannian Brownian motion in the context of totally geodesic foliations. Itô's formula is proved for the radial processes associated to Riemannian distances approximating the Riemannian one. We deduce very general stochastic completeness criteria for the sub-Riemannian Brownian motion. In the context of Sasakian foliations and H-type groups, one can push the analysis further, and taking advantage of the recently proved sub-Laplacian comparison theorems one can compare the radial processes for the sub-Riemannian distance to one-dimensional model diffusions. As a geometric application, we prove Cheng's type estimates for the Dirichlet eigenvalues of the sub-Riemannian metric balls, a result which seems to be new even in the Heisenberg group.