It gives you private entities to sue for wrongful death, though. Maybe the whole point is to keep lawyers and judges busy.
The same kids that drop rocks off overpasses into highway traffic. It’s not like high school physics is a required course.
Well, they DO have concrete barriers there NOW…
From: Google sued a year after man's death in Catawba County, NC | wcnc.com
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Online maps and map services def have issues. Several years ago, we missed a turnoff to Disney World. Our GPS helpfully directed us down several roads, then onto dirt roads, then helpfully announced “You’ve arrived at your destination!” at a wide spot on the back fence, with a water hazard in the way.
Regarding private roads going public and vice versa, we used to have a very handy road connecting 2 sections of highway across ranch lands. The ranch requested maintenance help on the well travelled connector. County refused, so the ranch cut off access with gates and barricades.
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“If Google told you to jump off a cliff, would you?”
(And the answer, apparently is: yes. This sort of thing happens too regularly.*)
*It puts an interesting wrinkle on the (popular understanding of the results of) the Milgram experiment - people blindly following the commands of authoritative machines. (Though yes, a full examination of Milgram’s experiments indicate something quite different from how they’ve been interpreted in the popular culture.)
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this seems like victim blaming to me. the person was driving at night. even being careful it’s easy to imagine you might not see the missing ground on a flat road. it’s an event that happens pretty much never, and it’s not something you’d necessarily perceive and understand in those conditions.
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Seems like everyone but the driver screwed up here. Based on Google Street view, as of May 2019, there were signs to the north at 1000 and 500 ft noting that the road was closed, and you can see some sort of barrier across the road, but it’s something that could easily be vandalized. https://maps.app.goo.gl/VQKCYRSx7JayyXSK9
And as of May 2023, there were definitely substantial barriers in place, but that was of course after the accident. https://maps.app.goo.gl/iJnrRLZ5fWMB2uYSA
Not sure why it took 10 years to “properly” close the road (I dunno, maybe fix the bridge instead?), or why Google seems to be the only mapping service that still shows the road intact. Also, I couldn’t find anything on Street View that makes those roads look private, so how would anyone that isn’t a local know that? All the road signs and street names just make them look like local roads. I’m not sure about Google’s liability, but someone needs to be held accountable. Yikes.
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Oh wow. From the news photos of the bridge, I assumed it was a deeply rural area. This is right in the 'burbs.
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Oh, don’t get me wrong - it’s completely understandable, especially if the person was driving at night. Previous cases I’ve read about were during the day, and included instances where people drove down into water that they could clearly see, assuming that the water must be safe because the automated directions wouldn’t steer them wrong. And fundamentally, that’s what’s happened in this case, and that’s the core issue - there’s an assumption that the route information provided by (e.g.) Google is good, when it’s just not reliable, at all.
Under normal circumstances this person might have missed that the road was closed and that the bridge was out - but it was made substantially more likely thanks to the (unwarranted) trust they put in Google Maps. (Which is natural - for Google Maps to be useful, the driver must put a certain degree of trust in it, otherwise they’d be stopping and driving erratically - and dangerously - as they second-guessed it constantly.) It creates an interesting - and potentially tragic - dynamic.
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Well, Google seems to have added plenty of markers on their map NOW. But according to some of these icons, Road opens September 27??
I think the unfortunate series of events, because Google was able to traverse the road without any issue years ago, the street was logged, almost etched in stone so to speak. Then, when the barriers went up, they probably were seen as temporary and it was presumed that repairs were underway?
And the years of people getting in touch with google to let them know that the bridge was out?
The bridge collapsed in 2013, but Google was directing traffic over it nine years later despite local residents “repeatedly contacting Google” to report the error over the years.
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I once had to drive an extra 200 miles when my GPS directed me to a road with a private gate across it.
Which might mean it’s private, or it might not: 7 Sneaky Ways Landowners Block Access to Public Lands | Outdoor Life
(But without knowing for sure, your decision to drive around does seem like the safest.)
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It’s the Deep Pockets syndrome. Sue the party who can most afford to pay rather than the one most responsible for the loss. Not saying it’s right; just saying it happens. It can backfire because, as mentioned in another comment, the party who can most afford to pay is also the party who can afford the best lawyers.
It is also found outside the Americas.
Wild, also, that during my Street View journey, I saw a school bus, and mailboxes along this route. Which means a lack of barriers and GPS accuracy could have routinely endangered local service providers. My semi-rural mail and bussing rarely has consistent drivers from one year to the next. I’m surprised this wasn’t a suit a lot sooner.
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I’d be curious about what the caselaw looks like.
It being possible to follow your cellphone off a bridge is recent-ish; but bad maps causing some combination of economic and physical injury seems like something that could, and probably did, start happing from time to time not long after the invention of enough cartography for people to be following maps; and even if there’s not a solid body of map law a map seems like it could be readily analogous to other compilations-of-facts-for-reference that could lead to lethal errors if followed too closely; with room for back and forth about the duty of the producer to be correct vs. the duty of the user to be prudent and whether certain classes of reference material are held to a higher standard than others for some reason.
From a cursory review it looks like team GIS has been fretting about the problem since at least the 80s; and their analysis suggests another couple of wrinkles: under some circumstances state and private producers of maps and charts may have different liability for the accuracy of what they produce; and apparently torts can behave differently depending on whether the reference material is classified as a product or as a service or a hybrid; so you’ve got potential layers based on who generated the data that google is serving up; and I do not profess to understand the abstruse analysis of angels on the heads of pins that determines whether maintaining a database is providing a service or actually being engaged in the sale of a product.
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No, it really doesn’t seem that at all. Every driver has a duty of care to operate their vehicle within the operating conditions present. If you can’t see the lack of a bridge you can’t see a pedestrian, an animal, or another broken down vehicle and shouldn’t be driving. Dark and rain aren’t reasons to lose responsibility, but reasons to exercise more care and particularly bad conditions might mean it is time to pull off and cease driving.
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My wife had a good take on this. Essentially, you wouldn’t sue the company that makes paper maps for this. Similarly, you probably wouldn’t sue AAA or whomever else might provide a route for you.
There are clear points when a person is responsible for themself. Trying a cross a bridge that isn’t there is certainly one of those points.
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Maybe they could have done something like this
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I can’t remember how they turned out, but I remember cases in the late 90s when GPS in rental cars first became available. A local example involved a renter driving into a river at night because the GPS showed a ferry crossing as a bridge.
@moortaktheundea & @GospelX the lack of a bridge is far less visible than a pedestrian. Did you look at the pictures of this broken bridge? You can’t see the discontinuity -it’s nearly invisible until you’re on top of it, possibly too late to stop.
I remember as a kid watching old westerns where people in stagecoaches or wagons would nearly drive right off a cliff in western canyonlands. How could they not see it?
Now that I live in the Western US, I know how. Canyons appear out of nowhere when you’re driving here. The nature of erosion means the sides of canyons are at the same height and the rimrock on one side just blends right into the rimrock on the other.
This bridge reminds me of that visual effect.
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who’s to say he didn’t see it and try to brake? we’d ask him of course, but he’s dead. so i for one am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
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