Folk have long joked about drivers following autonav into lakes and rivers, but this situation beggars belief.
-Google Maps directed a driver across a bridge which had been collapsed for 9 years.
-Google had been informed that the bridge was impassable.
-A private entity owned and was responsible for maintaining the bridge.
-There were NO warning signs/barriers.
I’m trying to think of an instance in which I get from here to there by driving on a road/bridge that is not state owned/maintained. And how a bridge is down for 9 years an there isn’t even a couple of construction sawhorses up?
Yeah that agency bears the responsibility here. I’ve seen plenty of cases where bridges have been closed for years after they were found to be unsafe (e.g. this one by my in-laws house in Maryland that’s been closed since 2015), but in my experience are barricaded like they have an exploded nuclear bomb balanced on them (that one has two sets of massive concrete barriers and innumerable warning signs).
The idea you’d have a road leading to a collapsed bridge with no warning signs or barriers is crazy, they were just asking for this to happen.
I really don’t think Google has any responsibility, but of course they have a lot more money than that agency.
It’s truly an epic clusterfuck and the lawsuit isn’t frivolous.
I don’t know how it slipped through the cracks at Google. I live on a a street that makes a 90° turn and my house is on the inside corner. Google maps sent people to the side of my house which caused a lot of confusion. I eventually went to Google and filled out an online form and it was corrected within a week.
Then there’s the bridge. How hard would it be to put down traffic cones at the very least? Did they even give a shit?
I agree. Another issue to consider is the fact they have sued the landowners responsible for the bridge as well. (as they should). It could be that they knew (or feared) that the landowners would point to google as a cause of the accident in an attempt to create an “empty chair” at trial to which they could try to allocate fault. If Google is going to be blamed, it’s prudent to bring them into the suit.
If a judge rules that Google isn’t liable as a matter of law and releases them on a motion to dismiss, then the other defendants can’t pin the blame on them either.
Thanks for the maps/pics. I was trying to figure out how far he was driving between this party and his home, why he would need directions, and why he would be unaware of a bridge that had been out for 9 years.
NONE of which lessens Google’s obligation to NOT direct drivers to cross bridges they had been informed were impassable.
The inset map is weird. Hard to tell whether the dead guy’s home was on the left or the right. Whichever, why did it have him make that loop on the right, which took him over the non-bridge?
The lay of the land is certainly different than I experience here in concrete-covered suburbia. If I lived there, I wonder how attuned I would be to where creeks and bridges were, and whether I would consult Google Maps for a 4.3 mile drive (rain or no rain).
Because there is zero expectation that they would be doing anything except mildly inconveniencing someone. There I’m sure are millions of the points on Google maps that are marked as passable in the database but in fact are not. It not a reasonable expect a company that runs GPS software to check every one to see that its not in fact a lethal death trap.
Liability for that falls on the company that is maintaining a death trap. I mean look at those pictures without a barrier that is absolutely going to kill somone sooner or later, with or without google maps.
I would have to guess that the expectation for drivers is to always be aware of hazards. Bridges can fail at any time. Trees can fall in the road. Kids can be in the road. A flash flood can make a road impassible. There’s an unlimited number of hazards which the driver may have to face in real time. If someone says to take Main street, that doesn’t mean the driver gets to drive along Main street without paying attention to anything which might be in the roadway.
The difference here is that Google was informed of the danger and allegedly took no action. The court is going to have to decide if that is enough to create a duty to update the maps.
True, but if the person saying to take Main Street knows that there’s a giant sinkhole, and yet advises a driver to take Main Street, why shouldn’t the person bear some of the liability for the accident that results?
I’ve experienced quite a few instances where Google Maps wanted me to turn down a farm track that clearly wasn’t a public road - some of them were obviously private as there was a locked gate; others were clearly not metalled roads and would not be suitable for an ordinary car.
I’ve also encountered a few cases where what looks like it might be a road, that Google Maps indeed identifies as a road, is marked with a sign saying ‘Do not follow your SatNav’ - here’s one. This is the other (I was there last week and there now an additional sign saying ‘do not follow satnav’).
I think this is probably just an artifact of the algorithmic nature of Google Maps data - they’ve imported a vast amount of information about roads and tried (mostly successfully) to use it to inform a turn-by-turn satellite navigation app, but in a few cases, the algorithm has made the wrong assumption about the data.
Arguably a closer analogy would be that the person saying to take Main Street had been emailed by another local friend the information that there was a sinkhole on Main Street, but accidentally deleted the email without reading it, so didn’t know when giving the advice.
Are you sure about that? B/c the map pic above shows the red square somewhere to the N of 36th, more in the area of between 22d St Ct NE and 39th Ave Ct NE. (Man, that area has the most complicated street names I’ve ever seen!).
Does anyone know which address was the drivers? And it was only 4 miles. Rain or no rain, why didn’t he just retrace whatever route he took to the party?
Yeah, come to mention it, we have some friends in Michigan, who live off a street that can only be approached from the N, yet Google always tells us to take a nonexistent extension of the road from the south - through a fence and across some fields. Our solution was to get a detailed PAPER map of the area, and draw in the route to/from their home! Go old-tech!
Because he relied on the tech. Also it was dark and maybe didn’t remember how to get back. I have no sense of direction. I wouldn’t have been able to retrace my route.
I wonder if copyright traps are part of the problem - map datasets often include fictional roads and junctions to make the identification of unauthorised copies easier to prove. Google Maps isn’t going to know the difference (for third party datasets they might have licensed)
The “number of private property management companies who were responsible for the land where the crash happened” as quoted in the article. This is entirely on them IMO. This was going to happen sooner or later, without so much as a traffic cone or warning sign, someone was going to drive onto that bridge.
