Plus, darkness.
Also since I have “home” saved in Google Maps sometimes when I’m away from home sometimes Google will send me a push notification saying something like “Traffic is light, take such-and-such road home” or “Heavy traffic on I-80, take such-and-such alternate route”. If I tap that notification it will open Google Maps and show me its recommended route. It’s plausible this guy got such a notification and just went with it.
Yeah add me to the pile of people who are bad with directions. I grew up in a small town so it was never really an issue, then I was in college and I got lost on campus a lot but at least I was on foot. I once got lost in my own dorm building. Enter GPS right when I moved to New Jersey and my goodness, it was like the heavens opened up. I have my GPS on at all times in the car, even if I know the route, because I may have to make a different turn somewhere and then I’d be screwed.
My Aunt is one of those people who goes to a place one time and then always knows how to get there. She knows exactly where she is at all times. Once, I witnessed her get lost. She got very upset.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know where I am.”
“That’s… my default state of existence.”
I am decent at reading a map though. It’s the actual moving through space where I get confused.
Exactly! You know why I don’t buy a protection plan when I buy a $20 blender? I can self-insure the damn blender, that’s why. I can assume that risk. Same thing with Google. Alphabet has a $1.66 Trillion market cap. Why would they need insurance against relative flea-bites like this? They would have it if their accountants said it was to their advantage, but they don’t need it, and can do without it if rates go up.
That’s their economics of potential liability. They’re probably far more worried about bad PR if this were to recur: that’s what will make them be more on the ball about things like this.
Sure, why not? I can think of places around here where, in the dark, that shadowy spot where my headlights don’t reflect anything just looks like a dip in the road. If there were a crater there, I’d have to be doing about 3 mph to not fall in. Must I creep along at 3 mph on every unfamiliar local road at night to be exercising due diligence? Why would I be expecting a stream? Why would I think the road needs a bridge?
In this case, where was the nice visible PRIVATE PROPERTY - DO NOT ENTER sign? The apparent absence of such a sign or any other warning of a dangerous road ahead would be a lack of due diligence.
It is interesting that Google Street View has imagery of the neighborhood, but the camera car clearly didn’t drive down the road where the accident occurred.
There’s a local road that Google Maps shows as being continuous in places where it’s intermittent, so I know their camera car didn’t drive down that road: it couldn’t have gotten through some of the places where it shows a road.
(The road in question is Bay Front Ave. on Holland Point at the southern tip of Anne Arundel County, MD. Google Maps shows one discontinuity in the road; actually, there are several.)
That’s kind of my point. Street View clearly has imagery that was taken after the bridge collapsed, so the camera car obviously couldn’t drive down that street. But I wonder if Google instructed the camera car driver to drive down that street, because as far as they knew the street was still there, and they want images of all the streets, but the driver discovered the street was impassable. In that case, Google should be able to use the fact that the camera car couldn’t get through to determine that the street is closed, or at least as a way of confirming the reports from local residents that the street is closed.
You’re assuming he came from home; what if he went into town to pick up a gift on the way there?
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A recently had to go somewhere I had not been before, two days in a row, for a class. I knew most of the way there but needed directions for the last mile, okay 2½ miles, to the site once I got off the highway. When I left on Sunday I realized that of my four trips in & out the GPS had given me three different routes for that last little bit. I have no idea why other than it was not for traffic as we were in an industrial area on a weekend, the busy times were about 5 cars / minute
I take long road trips every year and use Google maps a lot. Generally speaking the directions are good, but the app has sent me on bizarre combinations of back roads, side streets and dead ends more enough times that I know not to trust it blindly.
The facts you have stated are obviously insufficient to establish one way or the other. There could be any number of intervening facts that would make it more or less reasonable of an action.
In this particular case, the intervening facts are that an otherwise reliable system told him to drive there. Visibility was low, and it was raining. The bridge itself is visible, and had at least a partial bottom that could appear as a road, especially from the side. And there were apparently no barricades or other sign that the bridge it out, as one would normally expect for such a hazardous situation.
Given these facts, and assuming no other mitigating factors, I find nothing to suggest the driver was being negligent or avoided his own duty of care. Others have also stated this (albeit less formally) while have implied this by treating it as a tragedy and/or focusing on the two parties that seem to be at fault.
Your leading question implies you not only think the guy is clearly at fault, but that this is so obvious that no one could object. Your summary of the situation is so incomplete as to be misleading. And it does suggest a heavy biased against the deceased that some might find offensive.
Agreed.
Agreed
Well, I am not blaming him, except of course he was in charge. But I think Google is hardly at fault. The real bad actors here are the people in charge of that bridge. It either has to be fixed or blocked off safely. However, my guess is that the lawyers found they don’t have much $$, so are suing Google. This is a bad precedent.
It’s hardly a precedent. It’s how things have been done for decades. They always throw in the deep pocket if they can and it often works.
As you indicated, the other party doesn’t have much money so they won’t be able to pay the whole judgment. I believe how it works, if Google is found 5% liable or something, they will only have to pay 5% of the judgement. If it’s actually legally ridiculous, the judge will drop them from the suit which happens very frequently. They will name anyone possible and see what sticks.
Yes, the late great Strother Martin said it best in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid- "Morons- I’ve got morons on my team. Nobody is going to rob us going down the mountain. We have got no money going down the mountain. When we have got the money, on the way back, then you can sweat. "
I don’t think the road network data comes primarily from the street view camera cars - it comes from the map itself - the cartography, not the photography.
The reason you can’t navigate down that road with the bridge on it is not because there is (now) no road segment there - if you switch to map view, there’s no road marked there at all, so there is nothing for the little yellow streetview meeple to ‘stand’ on.
The map data and the streetview images we are now looking at are both dated after the incident being discussed in this thread.
It does seem like a good idea that the streetview camera car could feed back information to update the map itself and maybe that does indeed happen - so maybe the streetview car did report back that the bridge was gone, and the road was impassable, and maybe that went into the pipeline to spin off a map data update to the version we are now seeing.
But when the streetview car went there, it was just a pretty mundane and routine finding - the road was closed because the broken bridge route was blocked off with the concrete blocks we see in the streetview - it might even be that they never tried to drive down there if that road link had already been removed from the map data.
Thanks for your opinions. I disagree. Sure, there are other factors/actors who may contribute, but the bottom line is that if I cannot see a road out my windshield, I’d better be damned careful before stepping on the accelerator.
Where I live, the streets are grids, and I’m 2 right angle turns from a pretty major intersection. It is not at all uncommon for a visitor to ask, “How do I get back to the expressway?” But this guy is sticking around after the party to help clean up, and never thinks to ask his host how to get home - which could have elicited the heads up about the dangerous non-bridge just north of their location.
Nothing about that scenario encourages me to rely upon GPS in such situations rather than asking questions of real people with real life experience.
Why should he? He has a GPS.
Really? You’d bother your hosts in order to have them explain the route back when you have a GPS available that 99 times out of a hundred is going to be far more reliable than “you make a, uh, left, at the, uh, big tree, and then you drive down the dirt road for like six, seven hundred yards, and then you turn right”? Also, what if your hosts don’t know where you live?
If you went up to me after a party and asked me how to get home, I’d look at you like you fell down from Mars for a few minutes before telling you to GPS it.
As you said earlier -
Eta: thinking on it, I do have older relatives who ask me this sort of thing, or who try to give me directions to get places. In both cases, I tell them to GPS it or that I will.
It’s not an all or nothing situation. There can be more than one proximate cause to an accident. The driver, google, and the landowner could all be at fault, and the jury simply allocates fault as appropriate between them.
(in many jurisidiction)
In the old days, any contributatory negligence by the plaintiff would bar recovery. Over time the standard shift to “no recovery for plaintiffs 50% or more at fault.” Now, in most places but not all, a plaintiff who is 99% responsible for the accident can still recover 1% of their damages from the other at fault party (of course, that never happens)
Especially since my hosts won’t have some information that will affect the way my GPS routes me - like a particular highway entrance/street is temporarily closed or that traffic is very backed up on a particular road due to a collision. The only way I might ( and I emphasize might) ask the host for directions is if I only need directions from their house to the highway/street I know I need to get home. And then I have to hope that the person who gives me the directions is not one of those who can’t just say " I don’t know" and who can give better directions than " Turn right where the 7-11 used to be".