[HN Gopher] Google sued for negligence after man died following ...
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Google sued for negligence after man died following map directions
Author : dimitropoulos
Score : 120 points
Date : 2023-09-21 13:19 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| kristjansson wrote:
| Like a lot of failure, a few things going wrong at the same time.
|
| > Typically, barricades are in place to prevent drivers from
| crossing the bridge, North Carolina State Highway Patrol said.
| But the barricades had been removed after being vandalized and
| were missing at the time of Paxson's wreck.
|
| [0]: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-
| carolina/...
| fdsalkjvlkj wrote:
| That explains a lot! I was wondering how this only happened to
| one person and it took 9 years... Some idiot removed the
| barricade and then it only actually took 1 week.
| kristjansson wrote:
| From [0]
|
| > as well as three people who own or control the land on which
| the bridge on 24 Street Place NE sits.
|
| and from [1]
|
| >The lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in Wake County, names
| Google and Google's parent company Alphabet, Hickory businessman
| James Tarlton and the companies Tarde LLC and Hinckley Gauvain
| LLC as defendants.
|
| > Tarlton and the two companies are identified in the lawsuit as
| the owners of the bridge and the land near the bridge.
|
| That'd explain the abysmal handling of this from the city. City
| records don't seem to show that bridge as private, but I'm not
| sure? They do have a better view of the collapse though:
| https://arcgis2.catawbacountync.gov/newSetup/pictometry.html...
|
| [0]: https://nbcnews.com/news/us-news/widow-man-died-driving-
| coll... [1]: https://hickoryrecord.com/news/local/crime-
| courts/google-hic...
| danielvf wrote:
| Here's the timeline:
|
| - Bridge collapsed in a neighborhood in 2013
|
| - Bridge was owned by the neighborhood, not the government.
|
| - There was some kind of heavy barrier blocking the bridge, but
| it was washed away at some point in the past.
|
| - There was some kind of barricade/signage after that, but it was
| removed by vandals.
|
| - The man, while following google maps late on rainy night, drove
| off the collapsed bridge, into the water and died. No barriers
| were present.
|
| - Neighbors (not the HOA) have added heavy concrete barriers
| since the accident.
| mailund wrote:
| Me and a friend a mine were directed into a lake by google when
| biking across Denmark! We ended up having to backtrack quite a
| while back to get back to a road that didnt include quite as much
| swimming. Im still wondering why it was marked as a road, because
| it was straight through a wildlife reserve.
| lsaferite wrote:
| When I was a kid we stayed at a campground with the most
| beautifully crystal clear lake. There was a _paved_ and
| _marked_ road leading right into the lake and it continued
| until you couldn 't see it anymore. I assume the road was there
| before the lake. I also assume the lake was from a dam
| somewhere downstream. Anyway, point being, it was a legit road
| straight into a lake. I can see that being a case where a
| mapping company might give bad directions.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| When driving across the US, google maps directed me down a
| narrow highway somewhere in Wyoming. After about 10-15km it got
| narrower, then turned to a gravel road, finally turning into a
| dirt road that would be impassible for my compact car. Had to
| backtrack a ways to get back to a main highway after that.
|
| > Im still wondering why it was marked as a road, because it
| was straight through a wildlife reserve.
|
| I wonder if this is one of those inaccuracies that map makers
| use to catch plagiarism[1].
|
| [1] https://theweek.com/articles/466184/trap-streets-crafty-
| tric...
| Exuma wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Where I live there's a disused pedestrian/cycling bridge over a
| river, with no paved road whatsoever leading to it on one side.
| There's a mud "road" there which I wouldn't risk driving on in
| anything other than a tank or a tractor (my farmer neighbor does
| drive his tractor there and across water, so there's that). The
| bridge has never been made for use by vehicles other than
| bicycles since its inception.
|
| Nevertheless, when trying for navigation guidance to the street
| on the other bank of the river, many map applications insisted I
| could drive right across that disused bridge. Until recently,
| only OpenStreetMap and Google Maps presented the correct
| information. Apple Maps, TomTom, and Sygic all insisted I had to
| drive right across mud and the disused bridge (that would not be
| suitable for a car anyway).
|
| These maps also reported there had been a street in the other
| part of the town where there was only barely a boundary between
| two fields.
|
| I've been reporting this via Apple Maps feedback, complete with
| photos, for three years straight with no response whatsoever. I
| think one of my feedbacks just had been closed. Then a year ago
| Apple Maps got refreshed and their data sources got better, at
| least now they don't show roads where there are none.
|
| Google Maps used to navigate me in the wrong directions on one-
| way streets months, if not years, after the changes had been
| made. They also seem to choose the shittiest routes ever when
| driving from any A to B, like the narrowest unmaintained
| countryside roads with steep gradients, and ETA seems to be
| drugs-induced fiction, like their information on speed limits and
| the actual speed attainable on those roads is waaaay off.
|
| OSMAnd and OSM data in general is way better, I only wish it was
| recalculating the routes faster. Oh, and live traffic
| information.
|
| I'm glad at least there's some movement to have some
| accountability about that clusterfuck. But then again, whom am I
| kidding, that won't move the needle in ad sales so nobody's
| giving a shit.
| [deleted]
| internet2000 wrote:
| This seems to be the bridge for context:
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/dtEvqS9iWUURUWM1A
|
| Crazy it just has bushes blocking the way.
| eli wrote:
| That picture is from May 2023. Seems safe to assume that
| additional barriers were added after the death in 2022.
| dathinab wrote:
| the picture shows concrete barricades, too
|
| it also seems to have been taken after the accident
| skowron wrote:
| Crazy that someone would just drive through those bushes...
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| New age life insurance fraud?
| cornstalks wrote:
| Were the bushes there in 2022? That picture is from 2023.
| gwd wrote:
| Did the driver come from that side, or the other side, which
| doesn't look like it has any bushes?
|
| The photo here has pretty clear barriers, but one of the
| articles posted elsewhere in the comments said that the
| barriers had been removed.
| tbihl wrote:
| The plaintiff is probably hoping to get a favorable hearing by
| finding only jurists who have Google directing people to drive
| through their driveways. It might work.
|
| Seriously though, why aren't they suing the negligent
| municipality? Clearly the lack of markings or barricades is the
| problem.
| SSchick wrote:
| Anecdote:
|
| I reported multiple places where google maps (or in this case the
| tesla navigation system which runs on the same) gives dangerous
| instructions.
|
| One of them is right here
| https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6293355,-122.1879246,112m/da...
| The assistant will tell you to stay keep left (which you don't
| have to since both lanes converge later) way too late, causing a
| lot of people to cross the median last second, this caused
| numerious accidents.
|
| I reported this condition twice, no actions on their end was
| taken.
|
| I'd consider this neglegent.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Staying left is legal though?
| SSchick wrote:
| Maybe I didn't make it clear, people will be in the right
| lane and the assistant will instruct them last second to move
| to the left lane. This creates a dangerous situations as many
| US drivers do not care about traffic laws and cross the
| median. This is dangerous since this is generally unexpected
| to other drivers who will often have to sverve / brake to
| avoid collissions.
| karussell wrote:
| btw: Tesla navigation system is very likely based on
| OpenStreetMap data and not on Google (even though the map shown
| is a Google map)
| nonfamous wrote:
| A thought I might know where this is based on your description
| alone, and I was right, I think. I assume you're talking about
| the merge from 405N to 520E? I've thought the same thing about
| the wrong directions too.
| SSchick wrote:
| Updated link since the first variant would not point to the
| location accurately for some reason.
| junon wrote:
| As much as I dislike Google at a very deep level, this isn't
| Google's fault. That's like saying everyone who searches "how to
| dispose of a body" after murdering someone is somehow Google's
| fault.
|
| Apple Maps's app icon showed a route off of a bridge for the
| longest time. Is Apple liable if people drive off a bridge, then?
|
| I feel for the deceased's family but the local government or
| state government are at fault here.
| corbezzoli wrote:
| What an absolute joke. Google is not god. They cannot possibly
| ensure that all of their data is correct.
|
| Give that the local government neglected this road for years
| without placing a single permanent market to close off the road,
| I'm going to assume that they also never reported the road as
| closed.
|
| Legally, Google should be in the clear. Technically, I hate that
| Google won't take such reports, because I encountered the exact
| same situation before (except I did not drive through)
| wslh wrote:
| Not really. When you are the size of Google you should be
| responsible. If they cannot ensure that Google Maps data is
| correct they pay the issue in fines.
|
| I see very basic issues with Google Maps that are not addressed
| that make me think they are not caring enough about the quality
| of the product. I imagine that a company that produced so many
| cutting edge stuff could handle this kind of problems. They
| also bought Waze to have realtime information.
| zihotki wrote:
| In 2020 a person frooze to death in Syberia due to GMaps giving
| them a 'shortcut' via long time abandoned road (1).
|
| In a small country like Netherlands it also has issues of being
| up to date with road works and closures and that information is
| available well in advance.
|
| That looks like a general problem of keeping navigation
| information up to date. And I'm not sure if such problem has a
| good solution. Probably some motivation/regulation from a
| goverment is needed to ensure that map service providers are more
| reliable.
|
| 1 - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13438396/driver-18-froze-
| death...
| dathinab wrote:
| In difference to this case cases like google routing people
| over ofroad countryside roads (e.g. through the middle of
| Australia, desert routes, tundra routes etc.) should be
| something you could/should be able to sue them over.
|
| But this case looks like the local government majorly fucking
| up.
|
| In general the maps are updated in many countries based on
| information from the respective department for road whatever.
|
| It pretty common that when random road closures are not in
| gmaps that it's because the respective official channels didn't
| publish that information.
|
| Like how is google supposed to know when a random road gets
| absconded, temporary closed, newly opened etc. if no one tells
| them?
|
| And random complains from people using the service aren't
| really a reliable (or trustable) source.
| belltaco wrote:
| That's really sad. I would've hoped that a 20 foot drop into
| water would be survivable given that a Tesla was driven off a
| cliff at 80mph and survived a 250ft drop into ground. There might
| be some element of luck involved with the angle of impact and
| what not.
| [deleted]
| asddubs wrote:
| It seems to be very shallow water, but it was pitch black, so
| maybe the husband just had a hard time orienting himself and
| getting out of the water
| drewbitt wrote:
| He died via drowning, so survived but just couldn't get out of
| the vehicle in time.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| I find this story hard to believe. If you go to Google streetview
| it shows that barriers are indeed present (time stamp of May
| 2023) as well as significant overgrowth behind said barriers.
|
| Address for the curious is 3844 23rd st ln NE hickory NC
|
| You can even see the barriers on bing maps. They're not big
| barriers and it looks possible to drive around them.
|
| What I think really happened was Mr Device Salesman in his "jeep
| gladiator" got cocky and tried to off road his vehicle because
| hey, it's a Jeep.
|
| Instead the drop in the road was hidden and he drove himself
| essentially off of a small cliff.
|
| The two problems here are: 1. Blindly following a GPS and not
| thinking critically about where you are going. 2. Trying to off
| road a vehicle without investigating the terrain prior to
| driving.
|
| I'd say this is a potential Darwin award. It's sad but a
| cautionary tale about not being a thinkless lemming with GPS
| tools and off roading.
| a1o wrote:
| It was raining, night and the barriers weren't there in 2022.
| The bridge also has a very unfortunate still in place guard
| rails going from one side to the other, so only the bottom of
| the bridge is collapsed, which adds to the illusion that the
| bridge is still there in the previously mentioned conditions.
| :/
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| There were already in place back in 2014 which you can
| observe on bing maps.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Granted it's not mentioned in FTA, but the barricade was
| removed at the time of the accident.
|
| > Typically, barricades are in place to prevent drivers
| from crossing the bridge, North Carolina State Highway
| Patrol said. But the barricades had been removed after
| being vandalized and were missing at the time of Paxson's
| wreck.
|
| https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-
| carolina/...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Someone owns that land. That is the person or party who is
| ultimately responsible for allowing a hazard like that to exist
| for years without proper (or even any) safeguards, barriers,
| warning signs, etc.
| ar_lan wrote:
| I'm curious of the legal implications and how this would play
| out, but I don't really think I understand how Google is
| responsible here. Was the driver not paying attention?
|
| IIUC Maps TOS calls out that actual conditions may differ from
| their updates. I wouldn't think Google is responsible when there
| is an accident in front of me on the road.
|
| If anything, this just calls out maybe Google Maps is not as
| _accurate_ as people always believe. There are competitors to use
| instead. It 's also free - unless guaranteed as a public utility,
| I'm not sure I buy that there is any responsibility on Google
| here at all beyond "make sure to update regularly."
|
| This really seems like it falls squarely on the driver (pay
| attention to road conditions, people!) and maybe the local
| government responsible for the bridge/roads.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > I don't really think I understand how Google is responsible
| here. Was the driver not paying attention?
|
| I would blame the government for not closing off the road
| before I would blame the driver.
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/05/americas/brazil-wrong-directi...
|
| "Waze app directions take woman to wrong Brazil address, where
| she is killed"
| parhamn wrote:
| This article has an image of the bridge (and the accident?):
| https://nbcnews.com/news/us-news/widow-man-died-driving-coll...
|
| I assumed the bridge was much taller. The flipping of the car is
| very unfortunate.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Google is _still_ providing driving directions over the collapsed
| bridge:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/dir/35.7822529,-81.2819178/3834+...
|
| I got the location from LeifCarrotson on this comments page, who
| helpfully provided a link to the bridge in 3D Maps mode where you
| can clearly see the collapse:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7815814,-81.2828119,82m/data...
|
| (I'm writing this comment as root-level rather than replying to
| LeifCarrotson, for higher visibility, so people can see this is
| still not a fixed problem.)
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| And in case anyone is wondering, OpenStreetMap got it right!
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=35.781302%2C%20-8...
| [deleted]
| karussell wrote:
| Another comment showed the Google link where the route was
| blocked which got me interested. And the solution is: the
| bridge is mapped as one-way street :) ! (try swapping the
| start+end and it won't pass the bridge)
|
| Very confusing... any maybe the reason why it has been not
| properly fixed.
| bell-cot wrote:
| IANAL...but Google _still_ serving up the wrong data - ~1 year
| after the fatal accident, and also after the lawsuit was filed
| against them - seems unlikely to score sympathy points in the
| jury box.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| How has that road not been closed off?? That's the bigger news
| here.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Why isn't the bridge fixed?
| RandallBrown wrote:
| It was in the Bing street view. I wonder how the signs got
| removed.
|
| https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=c3224526-5ada-4a41-b8f7-e854f.
| ..
| dublinben wrote:
| That's clearly an insufficient level of "closure" for a
| hazard like this. Those signs look like they could easily
| be removed by one or two people without any kind of
| specialized tools. An adequate barrier would be more like a
| few concrete blocks physically preventing anyone from
| driving past.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| It looks like that's what they have there as of this
| year.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's extremely common for roads in the "country"
| because there's not much available for the cost of
| installing jersey barriers across the road, etc.
|
| But when the bridge is out such that you'd die, it
| probably calls for a more permanent blockages or at least
| sending out the bulldozer to put up some earthworks.
| crazygringo wrote:
| "Typically, barricades are in place to prevent drivers from
| crossing the bridge, North Carolina State Highway Patrol
| said. But the barricades had been removed after being
| vandalized and were missing at the time of Paxson's wreck."
|
| https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-
| carolina/...
|
| I can't find any reference to _who_ removed the barricades,
| but that seems like the main criminally negligent action to
| me here. That 's obviously going to get someone killed --
| and it did.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| Yeah this clearly seems like the fault of whoever is
| supposed to manage that road. Google maps also shows
| physical barriers there in May 2023, but different ones.
| Hard to say what it looked like at the time of the
| accident but if the road just disappeared I could
| absolutely see how that accident would happen with or
| without navigation.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7811991,-81.2834442,3a,16
| .5y...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Oh, this is crazy. So Google still provides directions
| across that bridge, and has data collection from May
| showing (qualitatively) the bridge is out. But when you
| go to StreetView, you can't hand-navigate across the
| bridge in the 2023 data, but if you snap back to the 2012
| data, you can... And Google will let you navigate back
| and forth, then snap back to 2023.
|
| Looks like the revision in 2023 didn't _remove_ the road
| from the 2012 dataset, and Google 's map resolution
| algorithm is chaining back to an older revision to find
| the connectivity that justifies the path. What a mess.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| You can't go over the bridge in street view in 2023
| because the street view car didn't drive over it (in this
| case because it can't). Clicking the map in street view
| chains to the nearest street view image.
|
| They don't definitively use street view data to determine
| their route network for navigation; there's lots of roads
| that the street view car doesn't drive which are valid
| roads. For example forest resource roads are like that
| here in BC, they are allowed to be driven (when the roads
| are open) and will be navigated through by Google maps
| (regardless of if it's actually passable) but street view
| cars never go down them.
|
| Correspondingly, you can use street view to move across
| roads that are not navigable at all -- for example
| backwards up one way streets or across intersections that
| are impassable by cars. The street view map isn't a good
| proxy for routability.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's not, but in this case I suspect it's giving us a
| clue as to how the algorithm broke. Here's my imagined
| failure mode:
|
| 1. Google collected new data in 2023
|
| 2. That data didn't include a turn down the busted road
| (because why would they bother, they can see the bridge
| is out from up the hill)
|
| 3. Since there was no turn down the busted road, there
| was no new data collected for the busted road
|
| 4. They ran a fusion step to build a connectivity graph
| from snapshots of traversible world. Here in particular,
| that would have been necessary because there isn't much
| visibility on the road from the sky either, due to the
| tree line.
|
| 5. Their algorithm considered street-view-collected data
| to be highest-quality. Especially new street-view-
| collected data.
|
| 6. The connectivity graph went "Hm, I'm missing new data
| for this road segment... Oh, but I have some from 2012.
| I'll just assume we missed collection here and fuse the
| old data in to build a coherent map."
|
| 7. This fusion step killed all the "Hey this road doesn't
| exist" edits because it kicked out a new, "pristine" map
| from real-world measurements. In essence, the fusion step
| improperly updates the system's belief on recency of data
| so that the 2012 data is treated as fresh as the 2023
| data and overrides older (2022 etc.) reports the bridge
| is out.
|
| Steps 6 and 7 here are bugs, but it's a subtle enough bug
| that I can imagine the Maps team failing to catch it
| until disaster hits.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| My point is that I do not think that google uses the
| street view car data for creating their road networks at
| all, because the data is effectively useless at that for
| a wide variety of reasons.
|
| The first reason is that while GPS data has sufficient
| accuracy to, with markov models, correctly identify which
| road of an established road network you are on, it
| doesn't have sufficient accuracy to retrospectively
| create an accurate road network from raw GPS tracks. The
| second reason is that the route that the street view cars
| take would cover the road network for photographic
| purposes is not sufficient to enumerate the annotations
| that must be captured in a road network to facilitate
| navigation, especially once you consider that street view
| has not just driving navigation but also cycle and
| pedestrian navigation. The third reason is that the
| street view car will not drive most roads frequently
| enough to be sufficient for map maintenance and will not
| drive many roads at all ever, purely on a cost basis.
|
| Google maps gets their road data from a series of
| partnerships with private companies and public entities.
| Those partners provide highly detailed, human maintained
| road network data which are integrated into an annotated
| directed graph which is then used for navigation. Street
| view cars fundamentally do not have enough information or
| accuracy to be an authoritative source for this, and it's
| far more likely that the street view cars get their
| driving routes _from_ google maps ' road data.
|
| It's possible they consider some street view data in
| generating their map features. But again, there's a wide
| variety of reasons that street view might then not go
| down a road, so having google maps automatically remove a
| road from their dataset when the street view car doesn't
| go down it would result in far, far more numerous and
| problematic edge cases than this one (think roads
| disappearing because they had construction on the day
| google street view was in the area or the driver missing
| an area of town and having it disappear from the map). I
| have no insider knowledge and google is fairly quiet
| about their process but I would expect street view to be
| essentially a feature only built on top of the road
| network, and I would be extremely surprised if it
| functioned as the authoritative source for it.
|
| If we look for a process improvement, I think what could
| have been a feasible organizational solution is -- since
| the google street view car _has_ been down this path
| since the accident -- to encourage street view car
| drivers to submit corrections for the road network when
| it 's incorrect and prioritize those. But it sounds like
| humans were already submitting this and nobody was doing
| anything and others have commented on how opaque the
| process can be so I've no idea what happened on that end.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > But it sounds like humans were already submitting this
| and nobody was doing anything
|
| This is what leads me to believe that there was a data
| fusion error. The scenario that sounds likely is that
| they successfully flagged the street aa unnavigable, then
| something happened in the intervening time (such as a May
| 2023 updated data collection) that convinced the map it
| had newer real-world-facts to contradict the older human
| reports.
|
| I agree that StreetView isn't sufficient on its own. But
| if Google is doing any kind of AI analysis of the road
| images, StreetView collection is the highest-accuracy
| data they could possibly draw from. This smells like "We
| trusted our algorithm for going from road images and car
| path metadata to map construction and it failed us."
|
| > think roads disappearing because they had construction
| on the day google street view was in the area or the
| driver missing an area of town and having it disappear
| from the map
|
| That's two reasons they can't rely on _only_ StreetView
| collection; they 'd have to have an algorithm for fusing
| StreetView data with other data sources (including older
| StreetView runs).
| cma256 wrote:
| I'm reminded of a certain episode from The Office...
|
| People should be responsible for the machines they operate. North
| Carolina should be responsible for their roadways. Google
| _should_ update their maps but that's aspirational. It's clearly
| a hard problem to solve when no data exists.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > People should be responsible for the machines they operate.
|
| Yes, but there are limits. E.g. if you're sold a car whose
| brakes are not fit for purpose, the manufacturer should bear
| some of the blame when you hit something. The alternative is
| that every consumer needs to be an expert (or consult an
| expert) before every purchase, which is a ton of friction for a
| functioning economy.
|
| I'm not sure how much blame Google should bear in this case,
| but that's why we have a court system.
| korse wrote:
| I agree there are limits, but I think you are setting a
| pretty low bar with the given example.
|
| Just because they aren't designed to fly doesn't mean car
| acquisitions don't need to be 'pre-flighted' and taken for a
| shakedown cruise.
| freejazz wrote:
| What you are responding to is prima fascia defective
| product liability. Selling a car with malfunctioning breaks
| is the purchasers problem? I'm shocked
| asddubs wrote:
| if they were informed like the article says, I definitely
| think they should be liable to at least some extent.
| [deleted]
| freejazz wrote:
| >It's clearly a hard problem to solve when no data exists.
|
| If you read the article, Google had received reports that it
| was directing drivers to that collapsed bridge at least 2 years
| prior to this man's death, and google responded saying "they
| were looking into it".
| solardev wrote:
| I'm one of what Google calls a "Local Guide". All that means is
| that I'm active in Maps, frequently submitting fixes, closures,
| additions, pictures, and whatnot.
|
| I think it's really cool that Maps has these community features
| (and they're often more up to date than even OpenStreetMap).
|
| But the process is totally opaque. Sometimes you submit a
| random edit[1] and it shows up a minute later. Other times you
| can submit the same highly important edit (this road will be
| closed for months), multiple times, and it won't show up for
| months if ever. But beyond the initial confirmation that says
| thanks, they'll review it, nothing. No status updates unless it
| actually goes through. No request for additional evidence or
| denial with or without reason. Just silence a lot of times.
|
| I wish they'd provide followups and really allow the local
| guide community -- their volunteer boots on the ground "ground
| truth" team -- more transparency and proper change tracking. We
| want to help. We live in these places and use Maps multiple
| times a day.
|
| Maps's errors range from inconvenient to outright dangerous (my
| area has a bunch of fake stop signs that don't actually exist,
| and real stop signs that aren't on Maps, and I've nearly
| slammed on the brakes when it told me there's a stop sign when
| there isn't). And it's gotten a lot worse recently. Not sure if
| they're using more AI or whatever, but there's just wrong
| information everywhere, often for months if not years. I fix
| them every time I can, but the process is aggravatingly slow
| and seemingly random. It would be better to use peer local
| moderators instead of whatever invisible process they have now.
|
| They don't lack data. Even the article says they received
| reports. They lack a functional pipeline to vet and approve
| that data in a reasonably timely fashion.
|
| -------
|
| [1] Side anecdote: One time, deep in my discontent during an
| election cycle, I marked a local political headquarter of one
| of the two major parties as a "Garbage Dump". It went through
| immediately and stayed for months, even making the local news.
| Every time you were in that area, the icon would prominently
| show up. Yep, political party X, still ever the dumpster fire.
| Got a kick outta that, heh. Sweet, petty digital vengeance.
| Rygian wrote:
| What you describe are not community features, but rather
| "user-sourced one-way value creation," ie. you can't benefit
| from the content you contribute unless Google takes
| unilateral action to allow you.
|
| Why don't you contribute to OpenStreetMap instead? That way
| it will be more up to date than Google Maps in your corner of
| Earth too (like it does in many areas). Organic Maps is a
| very good replacement for the Google Maps app, I am told.
| solardev wrote:
| Responded to a similar sibling comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37598699
|
| But in regards to:
|
| > What you describe are not community features, but rather
| "user-sourced one-way value creation," ie. you can't
| benefit from the content you contribute unless Google takes
| unilateral action to allow you.
|
| It's not very different from, say, Metacritic or Steam or
| Amazon reviews or Goodreads. Or this HN forum, for the
| matter. These things unfortunately have a network effect,
| and it takes a critical mass of editors to make them
| worthwhile. Maps has that first mover advantage, coming out
| the same time at OSM but seeing massively more adoption,
| especially when it comes to POIs like restaurants and such.
|
| I find that OSM has better and better geography, but its
| POI layers are still lacking modern conveniences like
| contact information, reviews, and photos. Its UI is still
| pretty primitive and opts for miscellaneous tags instead of
| useful primary business attributes. Generally I just find
| it harder to use, and harder to share with others. I feel
| like it's juuuust near critical mass, but not quite
| there...
| Rygian wrote:
| > It's not very different from, say, Metacritic or Steam
| or Amazon reviews or Goodreads.
|
| I fully agree, and refuse to feed unpaid content to them.
|
| > Or this HN forum, for the matter.
|
| No. (Unless HN is monetizing my content in some way I'm
| not aware of.)
|
| > [OSM] POI layers are still lacking modern conveniences
|
| Please come join us and help make it better! :-)
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| >Maps's errors range from inconvenient to outright dangerous
| (my area has a bunch of fake stop signs that don't actually
| exist, and real stop signs that aren't on Maps, and I've
| nearly slammed on the brakes when it told me there's a stop
| sign when there isn't)
|
| so you've almost caused accidents looking at your phone
| instead of outside the car at the actual road?
| stefan_ wrote:
| Seriously, what on earth are you doing looking at your
| phone for a fucking _stop sign_.
| solardev wrote:
| That stop sign feature is relatively new. I had to glance
| at the phone (mounted to the dash) to know where to turn,
| and saw the new stop sign and was like "wtf". It's a
| steep hill that probably COULD use one, but in the moment
| I was afraid that I'd missed it. It didn't actually
| exist.
|
| After that experience I learned to just ignore them all
| in Maps.
| jraph wrote:
| That's not a fair analyze.
|
| You can notice a stop sign being displayed on a screen
| attached near or on the windshield at the corner of your
| sight when you are looking at the road.
|
| I would imagine anyway. I don't drive much. I bike and take
| the train.
| solardev wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. When that feature first came out (showing
| stop signs), it caught me by surprise. I was going downhill
| in an area with poor visibility and I was alarmed that I
| missed a stop sign and braked. No accident, thankfully, but
| I never trusted Maps's stoplights and stop signs after
| that.
| solardev wrote:
| (Too late to edit my other response)
|
| To be clear, I think the stop signs and stoplights in
| Google Maps are a total anti-feature, a distraction that
| should be disabled. As soon as I saw them I wanted to turn
| them off (you can't), especially after this experience.
| It's been months now and they are still wrong, and there's
| no way to submit feedback about a stop sign, and I'm sure
| Google doesn't care. Sigh.
|
| Ironically, if anything gets me to switch to OSM, it'll be
| because Google self-sabotaged their service yet again. Maps
| peaked a few years ago and has been steadily getting more
| ads and clutter. And last week or so they rolled out a new
| color palette that makes it impossible to distinguish
| between the current navigation route and other alternative
| routes. It's really a safety hazard, sigh. Maybe time to
| seriously look at alternatives...
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| I'm also a guide and have submitted multiple road closed
| reports. One specific route takes people down a single lane
| dirt road to a creek that had a bridge over it a decade or
| more ago, but that is long gone. The people that live on that
| road average one or 2 people backing back out of the spot
| every single day. And no matter how many reports they get,
| they refuse to update their maps. Even with pictures showing
| the lack of a bridge.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Vandalizing the maps is why we can't have nice things, like
| community input on the maps.
| solardev wrote:
| Lol it's true, and why I'm glad there's human moderators.
| Still, at more than 500 contributions and 7 million views
| (it tracks them) and one act of sabotage... eh... I don't
| feel too bad :) The community had a good laugh too.
| [deleted]
| eitally wrote:
| The problem is that Google has a review process with a human
| in the loop for most of the submitted changes (unlike OSM).
| This makes it easier for them to negotiate relationships with
| data providers, but it also means a lot of things aren't
| enacted quickly enough to be useful.
| solardev wrote:
| I think having a human in the loop is essential, if only
| for catching things like my petty vandalism or honest
| mistakes.
|
| Wikipedia has humans in the loop too but doesn't take
| forever.
|
| It's more a matter of transparency and tracking, I think,
| never knowing what happens to an edit once it's submitted.
| In most similar user submission systems you at least get
| status updates if not outright version control and ticket
| tracking.
| jraph wrote:
| It really reads like you wish Google Maps were OSM.
|
| Why not contribute to an actually open database that benefits
| to everyone and takes your contributions seriously?
|
| (I personally don't think that Google, of all organizations,
| needs to be helped by unpaid volunteers - and they can import
| OSM themselves anyway if they choose to)
| solardev wrote:
| I think OSM is a great project and I do contribute from
| time to time. At a previous job where I was doing some GIS
| and web mapping, I went out of my way to get permission to
| open source my work and publish it to OSM. We did.
|
| But in my day to day life, frankly, Maps is just a lot
| easier. It has traffic and Wyze real time reports built in,
| shows crashes and construction and parades and whatnot. It
| has the world's best POI database with contact information,
| reviews, pictures, menus, etc. It has good offline support
| with vector tiles. It integrates with my contacts so I can
| easily say "navigate to friend X's home". It's very
| useful... when it's accurate.
|
| I guess I'm just practical like that, being generally
| supportive of OSM and open source in general, but not a
| purist by any stretch. If there are any other map apps,
| proprietary or not, that nears feature parity to Google's
| (especially real time traffic and reports), I'd consider
| switching and contributing there instead. Is anything close
| yet?
| fmobus wrote:
| Google importing data from OSM would certainly raise some
| hairs in the legal department.
| solardev wrote:
| How so? Do you mean Google's or OSM's legal department?
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| Open street map's license allows anyone to use their
| data, but if you "build upon" their data then you must
| release your version with the same license. Google maps
| would not be able to incorporate OSM's licensed data to
| their own data without releasing their own proprietary
| data freely as well, which they aren't willing to do.
| solardev wrote:
| Oh, like a copyleft/sharealike license? I didn't realize
| that. Thanks!
| bluGill wrote:
| When I signed up for OSM about 8 years ago I checked the
| box "I consider my contribution public domain". I then
| saw what looks like my edits show up in google maps a few
| months later. (I have no idea if google maps imported
| OSM, or if they did an independent edit) I don't see such
| a box in my account settings now, so I'm guessing they
| removed it, but at one time at least it was legally
| possible.
| 7e wrote:
| If Google was told multiple times of the error and didn't
| update their map, well, that's negligence. You can't recall a
| paper map, but you can update an online map easily.
| korse wrote:
| Never seen The Office, however 'people should be responsible
| for the machines they operate' is my exact feeling for a whole
| lot of technology. Thanks for the wording. I now have a concise
| way to voice my feelings about Autopilot regulation efforts!
| darknavi wrote:
| https://youtu.be/DOW_kPzY_JY?t=27
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Weirdly Google Maps usually knows about all the daily lane
| closures and closed exits on the interstate construction zones
| I drive through. Do state authorites have some kind of direct
| way to publish this information that mapping/navigation
| services can subscribe to? Or do they just rely on
| crowdsourcing this?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, there are APIs intended for governments, transit
| agencies, etc known as "content partners".
|
| https://contentpartners.maps.google.com/
|
| https://support.google.com/mapcontentpartners/answer/144284?.
| ..
| tass wrote:
| So much negligence here, partly on Google but:
|
| "there were no barriers or warning signs along the washed-out
| roadway" for a road which was destroyed 9 years before.
| yreg wrote:
| Why partly on Google?
|
| In my opinion it is obvious that marking / blocking off unsafe
| roads should be the full responsibility of a public
| institution. They cannot hand over any part of that
| responsibility to Google.
|
| What if someone drove through there without using a navigation
| / map? What if someone drove through there using an offline
| satnav with outdated maps?
|
| I would hope Google (or OpenStreetMaps!) is not legally
| responsible to keep their maps 100% updated and accurate, since
| it's impossible to do that.
| hef19898 wrote:
| All car mounted navigation systems have the driver confirm,
| paraphrased, that they are aware the save operation of the
| vehicle is their sole responsibility.
| freejazz wrote:
| Because they knew they were directing drivers to a collapsed
| bridge for 2 years and did nothing about it. Sure enough,
| someone eventually went over it. There is no legal principle
| saying that both Google and the municipality can't be jointly
| liable.
| jjulius wrote:
| Nine years, not two, according to the article.
| debugnik wrote:
| Two years prior they were notified of the issue by email.
| Nine years prior the bridge collapsed.
| cromwellian wrote:
| What if the guy was using paper maps? If this was 30 years
| ago would paper nap publisher be liable?
|
| When you are driving, you're responsible for being aware of
| the road. If you drive over a dangerous road that has no
| visible signs of it being dangerous, then it's the
| government's fault, or if a private road, the owner's
| fault.
| autoexec wrote:
| > What if the guy was using paper maps?
|
| Paper maps don't advertise themselves has having up to
| the minute information and continuous updates. Nobody
| expects a paper map to have the most up to date
| information. When someone uses a paper map they do so
| with that understanding.
|
| People do expect google to know when there's a traffic
| jam and they expect google to update their maps with the
| data consumers provide to them.
| relativ575 wrote:
| They may have real time traffic information, but please
| show where Google advertise Map has up to the minute
| accuracy, for the entirely map. Even if it does, things
| happen. What if the road collapsed 10 mins ago? Would you
| be blindly following the map's direction, regardless of
| what you do or do not see?
|
| > they expect google to update their maps with the data
| consumers provide to them.
|
| They should keep the map up to dated, Google is clearly
| not up the task. Liability is another matter. No way they
| should be liable. The lawsuit is frivolous.
| freejazz wrote:
| The issue is not "up to the minute accuracy" the issue is
| Google's response to being put on notice that it is
| creating a hazard by sending people over a collapsed
| bridge. This is how negligence law works. It is
| understandable that you do not realize this, but
| nevertheless you are incorrect because of this lack of
| understanding.
|
| This isn't a lawsuit where the road collapsed 10 minutes
| ago. It's a lawsuit where the road collapsed 9 years ago,
| and Google had at least 2 years of notice that it was
| sending people over the collapsed bridge. In your
| scenario, neither the gov't nor google would be at fault
| for their lack of warning. But that has no bearing on
| this situation, because it's not a lawsuit where the
| bridge collapsed 10 minutes ago.
|
| In the lawsuit, the plaintiff is going to establish that
| Google had notice. A defense of this, that Google doesn't
| update the map every 10 minutes _is_ frivolous, and no
| judge will allow an expert to testify on that point
| because the issue isn 't how often Google updates its
| maps, but what Google does to update its maps after its
| been informed that the map is hazardous.
|
| >They should keep the map up to dated, Google is clearly
| not up the task. Liability is another matter. No way they
| should be liable. The lawsuit is frivolous.
|
| It's not at all and you seem to have an uninformed view
| of the the relevant legal principles.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If the publisher published a new paper map release,
| including that bridge 2 years after the publisher was
| explicitly notified of the problem, and someone died
| using that new map, I wouldn't be surprised if they would
| get sued just as Google is now.
| dfdsafsadf2 wrote:
| That's not really close to what's going on. There's the
| normal user's presumption that Google is up to date, for
| instance. And Google takes steps to fulfill that, for
| instance by providing live traffic data and other road
| hazards warnings. Not to mention that people stepped
| forward with evidence saying they informed Google.
|
| Whether that nuance really matters is up to the courts I
| guess. But I don't think this is in the same ballpark as
| a decades-old map where the average user wouldn't presume
| it's up to date.
| yreg wrote:
| >normal user's presumption that Google is up to date
|
| I don't think that's a reasonable presumption. I have
| experienced Google maps being inaccurate countless times
| and surely so have the others. I doubt Google guarantees
| in any way that the maps are up to date and it would be
| unreasonable to expect that.
|
| What is, however, reasonable to expect -- is that the
| government blocks the road to a collapsed bridge.
| freejazz wrote:
| The issue isn't people's expectations. The issue is that
| google was on notice that it was sending people to a
| collapsed bridge and didn't stop. Upon some reflection,
| I'm sure you can come up with some reasons why there is
| an appreciable legal difference between the two. I think
| there is also a difference between what you are
| characterizing that people expect as "a presumption that
| Google is up to date" which just seems like a
| trivializing abstraction from the more specific point
| that people would not expect google to provide
| _hazardous_ instructions.
|
| >What is, however, reasonable to expect -- is that the
| government blocks the road to a collapsed bridge.
|
| That's completely besides the point because they can both
| be liable. So saying that the gov't has fault doesn't
| rebut that Google does too. After all, the gov't was not
| the proximate cause of the incident, as they did not send
| him over the bridge, that was Google.
|
| It's a bit obnoxious when people come on here to argue
| about negligence while completely ignoring what
| negligence entails, the distinctions in how it operates,
| etc, while pretending they are keyboard attorneys.
| yreg wrote:
| >That's completely besides the point because they can
| both be liable
|
| That's not at all besides the point. When I make my own
| navigation software and publish it on the internet, I'm
| not liable for keeping the roads safe.
|
| I defer that responsibility to the government. I rely on
| the roads being safe because there are other institutions
| responsible for ensuring that.
| freejazz wrote:
| It's not a question of you, it's a question of their
| obligations under law and nothing you are saying is
| responsive to that. They are on notice that they were
| creating a hazard by sending drivers over a collapsed
| bridge and they did nothing about it. It's prima facie
| negligence. You don't really seem to have any idea what
| you are talking about, and your arguments aren't
| responsive to the allegations the plaintiff made. See my
| other posts.
| Elidrake42 wrote:
| Knowing that a danger exists within the offering of your
| product and doing nothing to mitigate or remove the issue
| absolutely makes you, in part, liable. Do others in this
| situation share liability? Absolutely.
| [deleted]
| tass wrote:
| Negligent in updating maps that they were being warned about
| over years. I don't personally believe this makes them
| liable, though.
|
| I think liability of this is complex being that it's unclear
| to me who owns the bridge and road leading to it, as well as
| how obvious it is to a driver that they shouldn't have been
| driving on that road. There shouldn't need to be a wall
| preventing drivers from flying off every cliff, but if there
| was a normal-looking road leading off the edge it's a little
| different.
| caf wrote:
| It is mind-boggling both that such a piece of destroyed public
| infrastructure can stay in that state for 9 years, and that no
| kind of safety barrier or even signage was put in place in that
| time.
| alistairSH wrote:
| The part that confuses me is: _The North Carolina State
| Patrol had said the bridge was not maintained by local or
| state officials, and the original developer's company had
| dissolved._
|
| So, nobody is maintaining the roads in that neighborhood? It
| makes very little sense. The roads in my neighborhood are
| owned and maintained by the neighborhood (not that state or
| county) and we (the HOA) carry liability insurance.
| oooyay wrote:
| It has never made sense to me that a neighborhood is
| responsible for paying for a road that people beyond the
| neighborhood can use. Portland and Multnomah county work
| this way and as a result, part of our 1950s neighborhood
| has a gravel road that's become extremely problematic. The
| economies of scale make it easier for a city or county to
| maintain machinery for paving roads and making sidewalks,
| and yet some municipalities force this on residents. In our
| case, not everyone in my neighborhood make enough to be
| able to contribute to the construction of a road, much less
| repaving.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Not claiming this is the best solution, but with a formal
| HOA there are mandatory annual/quarterly dues, a proper
| budget for services/maintenance, reserve funds, etc.
|
| I'd prefer road maintenance was handled by the state, but
| the HOA works for maintaining common space and other
| services not handled by the government (trash
| collection).
| michael1999 wrote:
| There are often profound DISeconomies of scale in
| municipal contracting. Sloth, corruption, feather-
| bedding, etc. are all chronic problems in cities.
|
| If nobody in the neighbourhood can pay for a paved road,
| then maybe the road should be gravel. Especially a cul-
| de-sac -- the road exclusively serves the residents. If
| they won't pay for it, why should anyone else?
| coryrc wrote:
| And if you're an elderly person no one likes and are
| destitute, why should anyone else be forced to pay all
| your expenses?
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| > The economies of scale make it easier for a city or
| county to maintain machinery for paving roads and making
| sidewalks
|
| Generally that equipment is useful for more than just
| paving roads and is owned by private contractors in the
| US - the same contractors could be hired by county, city,
| or neighborhood.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It depends. Where I live the city owns a lot of
| roadbuilding equipment directly, and employs people to
| operate it. The roads they build are garbage. Uneven,
| bumpy, rainwater pools on them, etc.
|
| Sometimes they have too much work and contract some jobs
| to private paving contractors. The roads they build are
| flat, smooth, and drain well.
| eitally wrote:
| This is a big problem in North Carolina, especially in the
| exurbs surrounding the Triangle (Raleigh / Durham / Chapel
| Hill / Cary / Apex / Holly Springs / Clayton / Zebulon /
| etc). Developers have no problem buying land and building
| new neighborhoods, and even funding the initial road &
| utility construction/connections, but in a number of cases
| already (in neighborhoods less than ten years old) there
| have been issues where infrastructure required expensive
| repairs or updates and the developer claimed their
| contracts washed their hands of it, and that the HOAs hold
| responsibility for maintenance. I sincerely doubt the
| majority of home buyers in these neighborhoods would have
| expected to be on the hook to maintain sewer/water &
| electrical infrastructure, not to mention roads, sidewalks
| and signage.
| riku_iki wrote:
| maybe there was no neighborhood, just some abandoned area
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| It's the same as your neighborhood, but without the
| maintenance being performed.
|
| My little 15-unit private drive was a single homeowner's
| 25-acre plot in 1950. Someone built a house in the back,
| with a long driveway up to it. Then they sold three lots
| for others to build nearby, then in the 1970s they sold
| another dozen lots, including mine. In the 80s they pooled
| some money together and turned the gravel drive into a
| paved road, still private, we all just have an easement
| that allows us to drive on it. Now, 40 years later, that
| paved road needs repaving to the tune of $90,000, because
| tree roots are breaking it up and it's delaminating in
| spots from an inadequate repair job a decade ago.
|
| But try convincing 10 retirees with limited funds, and 5
| families with small children, to each dig in their pockets
| and come up with $6,000 for a new driveway. Most people
| have bigger priorities, which is why there's currently a
| few nasty potholes on the route Google will suggest for you
| (the only route to my house).
|
| This is even worse, because a bridge like that probably
| costs a lot more than $90,000, and instead of 14 out of 15
| people driving over it every day, most of the neighborhood
| residents don't need it.
| alistairSH wrote:
| The difference is we have a formal HOA with an annual
| budget. The HOA owns all the common property, including
| the roads, paths, and a few chunks of garden/yard. We all
| pay quarterly dues into the HOA's general fund. The only
| part I'm not sure about is what happens if the HOA
| becomes insolvent - that's not a situation I've heard
| about locally.
|
| Who actually owns the main road in your situation? As you
| each have easements, it sounds like the original house
| still owns it? I've heard of similar situations and it
| always confuses me, for just the reason you mention - I
| would never buy a house in neighborhood with no means to
| maintain then neighborhood infrastructure.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Sometimes driving on gravel or a less than stellar road
| is a simple concession to live this lifestyle. I have
| lived in an HOA and I will expend whatever resources are
| necessary to never live in one again. It is the worst
| form of local governance.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I suppose, but when that broken down road becomes a
| safety hazard, then what? That appears to be what caused
| the incident in the article.
|
| FWIW, I tend to agree that HOAs are less than ideal (and
| downright evil in some cases). But, I don't have a better
| solution the problem of shared common areas and
| infrastructure. I'd much prefer the county/state took
| over all roads, but in my neighborhood, we still have to
| deal with trash collection and common area maintenance
| (parking spaces, neighborhood entrance, signage, lighting
| on sidewalks, etc).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Do roads not break down and persist in an unsafe
| condition when under government stewardship? I agree this
| is a hard problem, but the solution is probably something
| like "mandatory inspections of private roads on a cadence
| by the nearest local government and shared liability for
| roads not marked as out of service." The government may
| not be responsible for maintaining the road, but it is
| reasonable to require they maintain road condition
| records for their jurisdiction, reporting obligations
| (including to mapping providers), and mapping providers
| (Google) should share in liability if they are not
| updating their records with regards to road safety when
| information is furnished (as this article indicates
| Google did).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Governments are large enough they can always find money
| to fix a road, so it's a matter of raising enough stink
| about it in public. With small-ish private owners and
| HOAs, the situation is reversed - there's only so much
| they can afford, and only so much damage bad PR can
| cause; you hit that limit, they'll just shrug and stop
| listening to you.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _Do roads not break down and persist in an unsafe
| condition when under government stewardship?_
|
| They can, but in my experience, anything that approaches
| a collapsed bridge in severity is resolved quickly. Large
| potholes can hang around, which can be unsafe, but
| anything bigger doesn't get left to fester.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Municipalities, counties, and states can issue bonds to
| pay for infrastructure maintenance. An HOA can't.
| macNchz wrote:
| Lots of factors can impact the HOA's ability or
| willingness to maintain things, though, as you note about
| the potential for insolvency.
|
| Presumably a bridge being swept away in floods could be
| something insurance would weasel out of paying, as an
| "act of god" or whatever, so unless the HOA has enough
| reserve to cover the (potentially very large) expense of
| replacement, it comes down to the members approving an
| assessment to fix it. If the bridge being out didn't
| significantly affect the daily lives of the residents of
| the neighborhood, it kind of makes sense that they'd be
| loath to shell out who-knows-how-much on repair, on top
| of their regular dues.
|
| This is one of the concepts addressed by StrongTowns.org,
| basically that American suburban infrastructure
| development has been following an unsustainable pattern
| for decades and we're now starting to reap what we've
| sown, here's an article on this exact topic:
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/11/1/suburban-
| bailo...
| amalcon wrote:
| Being rarely used is an advantage, though. You can solve
| the safety hazard component of the problem with a few
| hundred dollars worth of signs and barriers, rather than
| by actually repairing the thing. The convenience part can
| then be ignored.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| If you do this in a college town or something, have fun
| replacing those signs and barriers every few weeks, as
| they are graffitied, vandalized and stolen.
| amalcon wrote:
| My parents live in a community where one of the roads is
| named something like "High Street" (not actually that;
| it's a little road within their development). That sign
| gets stolen a few times a year by college students from
| the next town over because it includes the word "high".
| They have never had a road barrier stolen or meaningfully
| damaged, though -- they have maybe a dozen in various
| places.
|
| They budget about $50/year to replace the signs. Still
| much less, even over rather a long period, than the cost
| of rebuilding a bridge.
| caf wrote:
| It'd be quite a feat to steal or meaningfully vandalise a
| concrete crash barrier like this: https://www.jaybro.com.
| au/pub/media/catalog/product/cache/c2...
|
| Living with the graffiti seems like a strictly lesser
| problem than living with a road ending in a missing
| bridge.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Ideally, the concrete jersey barriers are temporary until
| the bridge is either repaired or dismantled appropriately
| (with proper road closure on both sides).
|
| It still blows my mind that a bridge on an otherwise
| publicly accessible road was privately owned and
| maintained. That's a new one to me - around here, there
| are plenty of private neighborhood roads, but none have
| bridges.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| A 10' long, 32" high jersey barrier weighs 4,000 lbs
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| I live in a place that is also off a private road and the
| solution that was come up with was "like" an HOA, but
| just maintains the actual road. They collected 10K, and
| then dropped the yearly collection to $125/year. 11
| houses on this road. Because yes, road repairs are very
| expensive. At one point, they were looking at 45K to get
| the road just _functioning_ until they convinced the city
| to take like 100 feet of it under their control
| [deleted]
| voxic11 wrote:
| Guessing dissolved companies don't make a great target for
| lawsuits, even if you win they have nothing to give you.
| Which is why they are going after google instead.
| caf wrote:
| They're going after Google _as well_. Probably in the
| hopes that they 're all found jointly and severally
| liable.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There's a relatively famous story of a former West Virginia
| mining town that had the only access bridge collapse,
| isolating the town via any route except private roads owned
| by the original mining company (that, due to bad blood via
| the way the mining town turned from a company town to a
| public municipality, the mining company refused to let the
| townsfolk use).
|
| Because the bridge crossed the river separating West Virginia
| and Kentucky, each state (two of the poorest states in the
| Union) pointed at the other as being responsible for
| reinstituting the bridge. Neither did so, and the Federal
| government refrained from intervening.
|
| Desparate to see _something_ happen, the de facto mayor (he
| didn 't want the job, but people tend to look for leadership
| in a crisis) hit upon a stroke of genius. You see, this was
| all happening... In 1977. The town's mayor wrote a letter for
| international aid to solve a humanitarian crisis... To the
| USSR.
|
| It took West Virginia like a week to announce their plans to
| build a new bridge.
|
| https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/print/Article/2433
|
| All this to say: bridges tend to connect two different
| municipalities because water tends to be a natural
| administrative and territorial divide, so it is not as
| surprising as one might think that they can stay down far
| longer than is efficient. Putting them back up requires two
| municipalities to agree on the cost structure...
| Municipalities that, worse than having differing goals, have
| all the long-memory animosities that build up from being
| forced-geographic neighbors, so they come to the table with a
| bag of _opposing_ goals.
| mcmoor wrote:
| Sometimes I thought how many rivers in the world become
| unproductive because they're used as borders so neither
| party can take advantage of it. Just like if France annex
| German up to Rhine, I don't think Rhine will be industrial
| powerhouse like it is but dozens of military outposts.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Ummm... The Rhine _is_ the border between France and
| Germany. Strasbourg seems to be doing fine.
| livefox wrote:
| Exactly, Google for sure should have updated it but why had the
| city or even a concerned neighbor not put a fence or even a log
| or something there to block access to the bridge? A sign and a
| temporary barrier would have saved lives here.
|
| Hell non-locals might have driven off the thing without GPS
| help, depending on how the bridge looked from road-level
| avereveard wrote:
| The kind of person that plows trough bushes likely overlap
| with the kind that would remove the roadblock.
| whylo wrote:
| Apparently there were barricades but they'd been removed due
| to vandalism. No mention of how long they'd been missing
| though. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-
| carolina/...
| saalweachter wrote:
| > But the barricades had been removed after being
| vandalized
|
| ... is this saying that, like, someone graffiti'd the
| concrete barriers in front of a collapsed bridge, and _they
| took the barriers away leaving the collapsed bridge
| accessible_?
|
| I'm trying to figure out how to parse this in a way that
| makes sense to do.
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| Indeed. Slapping a coat of beige paint over the graffiti
| has got to be easier than moving them.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The older article, from 2022, says:
|
| > Even barricades that had previously warned drivers not
| to cross the bridge had been washed away, WCNC reported.
|
| https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-
| carolina/...
| notacoward wrote:
| It's barely two days since I was saying right here that Google
| Maps's increasing awfulness had probably contributed to actual
| deaths. All of the Googlers (and Xooglers and wannabes)
| commenting here might try to minimize how much that was in this
| case, but I'm equally sure that there are many other cases.
| Building an app like this carries a responsibility to minimize
| likelihood of harm, no matter what the TOS says. Google is not
| doing that.
| Pyrodogg wrote:
| I won't put all of my issue on Google maps, also the County takes
| a big share. But when I was visiting my hometown recently I heard
| about a bridge that had been taken out months previously and was
| in the process of being replaced.
|
| None of the signs said "bridge out" just "road closed ahead". The
| state maps that overlayed the area but about another project
| showed no information about the bridge being out for most of a
| year.
|
| Google happily routed over the bridge that had been out for
| months. I reported it but haven't followed up on it. It's open
| again now recently.
|
| It's almost like no one wanted to acknowledge the bridge being
| out even though it got reported in local media early on.
|
| I can hardly believe there was no barrier to a drop from a
| missing bridge. I mean people can easily do worse driving off of
| a paved roadway but to being continuing on a what seems like a
| safe path is just nuts.
| murphyslab wrote:
| Google Maps should change the way that edits work. My experience
| suggests the current approach is to require independent
| verification, via volunteers, of too many user edits.
|
| If I were to update the hours of a local business with a photo,
| that gets addressed within a couple hours, since the photo offers
| a form of verification. But to correct the location of a feature
| often takes far longer.
|
| A pharmacy in my community had its location wrongly recorded in
| Google Maps, leading to people trying to drive through a very
| wrong route. The pharmacists himself had tried and couldn't
| change his business' location. I made the edit (as a "level 7
| guide" for what it's worth) and even then it required another 50
| days before it was verified. In that case, it was likely awaiting
| another user to verify.
|
| I checked the map today while thinking about it: Ten months
| later, the marker has been moved back, to the _incorrect_
| location!
|
| I fixed the pharmacy location because Google Maps was hurting my
| pharmacist, a good guy with a small business that I like. But to
| go out of my way to verify other edits, I'm not quite sure what
| the motivation is. Google should pay users -- offer some small
| remuneration -- for correct edits and for verification of edits.
| They already offer similar payment for information in other
| contexts: offering Google Play credits with their Google Rewards
| survey platform. Why not employ that on Google Maps, which is
| earning them around $5B/year?
|
| Another option might be to trust (then verify) for users who have
| a history of valid edits.
| binkHN wrote:
| Yeah. It's frustrating. I'm Level 7 as well (I use Google Maps
| to help me remember if I liked a particular restaurant or not)
| and it took me 7 months to get my new home address (new
| construction) into the system and I'm not certain if my edits
| were even responsible. So, for 7 months, deliveries were
| problematic because "everyone" used Google Maps and my house
| didn't exit.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| IIRC Waze supports almost exactly what you're describing. Which
| is kind of ironic since Waze is owned by Google.
| jedberg wrote:
| If I had to take a wild guess, your pharmacist's business is
| probably incorporated at the old address, and they haven't
| updated their incorporation documents.
|
| Google periodically pulls those from public records, and most
| likely this is why the marker moved back.
| murphyslab wrote:
| That's possible, however I'm not changing the address, I'm
| changing the position of the marker on the map by 70 metres.
| Google regularly tweaks marker coordinates, in order to
| provide better driving directions, without changing the
| address.
|
| Additionally, the wrong location, where the marker has
| reverted to, does not correspond to a building structure,
| rather it's in the middle of a greenspace. I've illustrated
| it here:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/kvYePAZ.png
|
| All of the other markers I've included in the diagram match
| what is shown on Google Maps; they are correctly positioned
| at the structure where the organization is located. One
| oddity of the location is that it is like a campus, hence all
| of the buildings share the same street address, but with
| different unit numbers (e.g. 9999 Hacker Road #5 and 9999
| Hacker Road #8).
| dathinab wrote:
| How do you drive of a multiple years ago collapsed bridge?
|
| I mean shouldn't the road to the bridge be blocked/fenced off? If
| not isn't that clear neglience of the state not Google?
|
| Sure Google routed someone to a path which didn't exist.
|
| But so could have someone using an older map or who hasn't been
| around for years.
|
| So either someone intentionally bypassed a road blockage.
|
| Or the land/state massively messed up by not blocking of a
| collapsed bridge.
|
| Through condolence to the family eitherway.
| dfdsafsadf2 wrote:
| The bridge was unmarked and wasn't barricaded. The court can
| assign partial liability to multiple negligent parties. The
| __average person__ expects Google Maps to be current, and
| Google Maps does provide minute-by-minute updates on traffic
| and road hazards. The __average person__ doesn't expect a paper
| map to be updated with the same frequency as Google.
|
| Downvote this if you feel that you know the legal standards
| that apply here, have read the article and disagree.
| gretch wrote:
| disclosure: I am not a lawyer and I have not studied
| frameworks associated with NC state. I'm a guy who reads
| books
|
| You keep describing the "average person", but this is not the
| framework that most law uses when considering negligence.
|
| Source: Cases and materials on TORTS; Epstein and Sharkey;
| 11th addition; page 139
|
| "It is sometimes said that the study of negligence is the
| study of the mistakes a reasonable man might make."
|
| And then there's a lot more text that goes on to talk about
| what is 'reasonable' and not just 'average'.
|
| Also, just because the average person wouldn't be harmed does
| not mean a party would not be liable, because there are non-
| average people like blind people or old people who must be
| protected.
| error54 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > State troopers who found Paxton's body in his overturned and
| partially submerged truck had said there were no barriers or
| warning signs along the washed-out roadway. He had driven off
| an unguarded edge and crashed about 20 feet below
| karaterobot wrote:
| If Google Maps sends people across a bridge that has not existed
| for almost a decade, I wonder why there have not been many more
| such incidents. Likewise with the signage and barricades.
|
| Maybe this unfortunate story is a reminder that GPS navigation is
| just an assistant, and you should always pay attention to where
| it's telling you to go.
| dathinab wrote:
| because normally broken roads get blocked of e.g. for bridges
| using concrete barricades
|
| and potential unmaintained off road roads tend to at least have
| warning signs and often are very obvious visible bad ideas to
| drive on
|
| so even if google routes people there they normally know better
| then to take that route
|
| through there had been all kind of cases
|
| like a (river) ferry being listed as a normal route in the map
| and people driving into the river at the ferry dock at night
| when the ferry was on the other side
|
| or people taking country side roads without any infrastructure
| they are guaranteed to get stuck one when they run out of gas
| because of navigation apps (not just google), like the app
| trying to send someone through the desert
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| This is what happened when they cut back on staff maintaining map
| accuracy and went to the community model with MapMaker.
|
| This team was way larger than 200 during my time there a decade
| ago and guess what? 2 years and you get the boot because they
| don't wanna pay to hire people who could actually do the work
| consistently. I loved working on POIs and Local.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/technology/google-maps-wo...
|
| Apple Maps is eating their lunch right now and OSM is way
| prettier. Google tried to focus on charging large businesses like
| home depot to do internal store mapping instead of getting the
| best data they could for routing, the internal rule was if its
| within 100 feet it was close enough.
| ak217 wrote:
| Just to make this more explicit for those following along...
| this is just another aspect of Google's TVC (temporary, vendor
| and contractor) caste system. Google's full-time workforce is
| supported by a larger shadow workforce of contractors who are
| treated as disposable and routinely denied basic workplace
| protections. I know TVCs who were illegally denied access to
| basic workplace facilities like bathrooms while required to
| work at a Google office.
|
| (I do think Google Maps is still generally better than Apple
| Maps and OSM, but I want the TVC situation to be recognized.)
| mmanfrin wrote:
| > Apple Maps is eating their lunch right now
|
| Source? Literally every single person I know on iOS still uses
| Google Maps because it is _significantly_ better.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| when I was in Maps, we heard about the call center that handled
| Maps complaints. As you can imagine, there are a lot of them.
|
| I _suspect_ (with no current knowledge) that the complaint got
| lost; buried beneath a bunch of newer ones and forgotten. That is
| on Google. They have a system to handle things like that.
|
| The NC authorities were also negligent, not only for the roads
| and lack of signage, but for not notifying Google themselves. A
| letter from the state would carry some weight.
| dathinab wrote:
| given that the road wasn't blocked of I suspect/speculate is
| that the local government wasn't reporting the bridge as broken
| for whatever reason and in turn it wasn't listed as broken with
| the state department responsible for infrastructure
|
| so when people reported it to google they checked back with the
| officials about how long the bridge will stay blocked and they
| got told "no the bridge is fine"
| AlbertCory wrote:
| do you know that, or are you just guessing?
| dathinab wrote:
| > I suspect/speculate
| Zak wrote:
| Google street view pre-collapse:
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/dnt6aztvp4rjLmHx6
|
| Bing street view post-collapse:
| https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=c3224526-5ada-4a41-b8f7-e854f...
|
| Openstreetmap shows the road divided by the creek:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/35.78149/-81.28311
|
| Looking at the street views, I think it would be pretty hard for
| someone driving safely not to see the washed out bridge from far
| enough to stop. The speed limit is 25 MPH, the road is straight,
| and the bridge is downhill from either side.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm looking at that Bing link and concluding the exact
| opposite.
|
| Because news reports say the barricades had been removed and
| were missing. And he was driving at night and in the rain. And
| there are no streetlights there.
|
| It's a tiny short collapsed area that you're easily just not
| going to see until it's too late. You might notice that a patch
| of the road appears darker but assume it was recently
| resurfaced black asphalt or something -- not that the road was
| entirely missing. Depth perception doesn't work on a pitch
| black area of vision.
| lsaferite wrote:
| Looking at the images, I'm confused how he drowned in that
| stream.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Man walks into a pole while reading TikTok, dies of excessive
| bleeding from head injruy. Family sues TikTok.
| WalterBright wrote:
| "The Office" had an episode where two of the characters were
| following the navigator's driving instructions, and the
| instructions told them to turn right into a swamp. They got to
| arguing about it, one saying the instructions must be wrong, the
| other saying that the navigator could not possibly be wrong.
|
| They drove into the swamp.
|
| Now it has become real life.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Compare the satellite imagery from 2023, which clearly shows the
| bridge is out:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/WXIxLtp.jpg
|
| with the Street View record from 2012:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/cen89bg.jpg
|
| I agree that it's negligent to not have barriers or signs, and I
| feel terrible for the daughters and wife mourning the loss of
| their father, but I think it's shocking that someone would drive
| off a bridge that you can see is out from the air. For the past
| decade, hundreds to thousands of residents and delivery drivers
| and visitors to this neighborhood were likely given these same
| directions but did not die there. They saw that the bridge was
| out and turned around. It's a residential neighborhood; there
| will be no signage that says a child or dog is in the road! This
| is not a situation for an instruments-only landing in a plane,
| you have to keep your eyes outside the cockpit, even if your
| instruments say to drive on.
|
| Edit - I also find it interesting that Google's map still shows
| the road as connected, but (now) refuses to route you over it,
| while Bing Maps shows the road as disconnected:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/D9dRF1B.png
|
| https://i.imgur.com/4NcTIxZ.png
|
| Maps link:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7815814,-81.2828119,82m/data...
| [deleted]
| fdsalkjvlkj wrote:
| > but I think it's shocking that someone would drive off a
| bridge that you can see is out from the air.
|
| According to the article it was pitch-black and raining. How
| can you be "shocked" that someone would have worse ground
| visibility in those conditions compared to your clear-day
| aerial view?
|
| And are you really "shocked" that you can notice a hole in the
| ground from the air easier than from in front of it?
|
| There was a barricade for 9 years. It was removed 1 week before
| the accident.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _There was a barricade for 9 years. It was removed 1 week
| before the accident._
|
| Can you link to a source for that? I'm looking but can't find
| it.
|
| If there was an effective barricade that was removed, it
| would seem the person/people responsible for that are the
| most criminally negligent here. That sounds like a positively
| insane thing to do -- it's going to get someone killed, as it
| did here.
|
| EDIT: found a couple of links:
|
| "Typically, barricades are in place to prevent drivers from
| crossing the bridge, North Carolina State Highway Patrol
| said. But the barricades had been removed after being
| vandalized and were missing at the time of Paxson's wreck."
|
| [1] https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-
| carolina/...
|
| [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/09/20/goo
| gle...
| Borgz wrote:
| I believe the driver was driving a car, not an airplane, so I'm
| not sure how the bridge being visibly damaged "from the air" is
| relevant.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I'm having trouble interpreting this:
|
| "I think it's shocking that someone would drive off a bridge
| that you can see is out from the air"
|
| Why are you equating air-visibility and ground-visibility?
| Holes/gaps are famously less visible from a shallow angle.
|
| Also, "everybody else avoided it" is a really poor defense.
| Most safety measures solve the 1-in-1000 or 1-in-100000
| scenarios, not the 1-in-10 scenarios.
|
| Edit: Previously I said I agree that the driver's awareness
| played some part in the accident, but I failed to read about
| the extenuating conditions. I think this was nearly 0% the
| driver's fault.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| OpenStreetMap also shows it as disconnected, as part of a
| change made after this happened.
|
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/35.78116/-81.28272
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/126938081
|
| The nodes on either side claim that there are barriers here.
|
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/10072951700
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/10072951701
|
| The comment on the changeset says "24th St Pl NE bridge over
| Snow Creek has been out for several years and will not be
| repaired. The road continues down to the creekside (and bridge
| wreckage) from both sides and is a serious hazard to drivers
| not familiar with the area. A man was killed"
| freejazz wrote:
| Well, people don't drive "from the air". They drive "from the
| ground".
| shaneoh wrote:
| Could have easily been at night and/or during a heavy storm
| with very low visibility
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| That's absolutely a possibility, but even in those conditions
| - especially in those conditions - one should always be
| careful to not drive off a cliff, or off the outside of an
| unexpected turn in the road, or into a fallen tree, or into a
| pedestrian, or into a stopped car!
|
| In about two months, I predict, some dark November morning
| here in Michigan will have hundreds of "accidents" because
| the first snows will fall. Some drivers will be cautious and
| slow, while others will be going 5 mph over the speed limit.
| The latter will slam on their brakes far too late given the
| icy conditions, and will rear-end the former. That's not an
| accident, that's a negligent collision. Seven months of clear
| roads have conditioned Michigan drivers into assuming that
| everyone else will always be going about the same speed. When
| that ceases to be the case, there will be a few weeks of
| adjustment. Years of following Maps directions, and seeing
| uninterrupted roads, conditioned this unfortunate North
| Carolina Dad into assuming that reliable GPS directions and
| maps were guiding him down an unobstructed road like any
| other. When that ceased to be true, it's sad but not entirely
| unexpected that this happened.
|
| Therefore, I propose Google respond to this incident by
| deploying an automated "Netflix Chaos Monkey" approach to
| their mapping data: Every thousand turns or so, provide bad
| directions - guiding people down boat ramps or through
| forests, send the wrong way up a one-way road. Show graphical
| maps with straight roads where there's a turn, and turns
| where the road is straight, show stop signs where there's a
| stop light. Show the speed limit as 25 mph when it's 55 and
| 55 when it's 25. All of those things will happen
| accidentally, so make them happen intentionally and help
| drivers build robust error-handling practices.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > but even in those conditions - especially in those
| conditions - one should always be careful to not drive off
| a cliff, or off the outside of an unexpected turn in the
| road, or into a fallen tree, or into a pedestrian, or into
| a stopped car!
|
| Yes, but you're missing the fact that _that 's not always
| possible_.
|
| You can be as careful as any human being can be, going the
| speed limit (or slower in bad weather), but unexpected
| things can happen faster than human reaction time can allow
| you to avoid them.
|
| And in the heavy rain at night, figuring out that the black
| patch of what looks like road a few yards ahead isn't
| darker asphalt because the road was recently resurfaced (as
| you might easily assume), but is actually the road entirely
| collapsed -- I'm not sure that would even be possible
| visually.
|
| So "always be careful" isn't helpful here.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >one should always be careful to not drive off a cliff, or
| off the outside of an unexpected turn in the road, or into
| a fallen tree, or into a pedestrian, or into a stopped car
|
| All of those examples are more visible in low-vis
| conditions than a missing bridge, due to the presence of
| physical objects - e.g. cliffs and unexpected turns always
| have barriers/signage. A missing bridge is the _absence_ of
| an object. I think this is a really particularly easy case
| in which to give the driver the benefit of the doubt.
| levinb wrote:
| That was the case here; 11pm, rainy night, after staying late
| to clean up after his daughter's birthday party.
|
| Bing maps shows barriers, google shows a clear road.
| Apparently the barriers had been removed.
|
| Normally I view these sorts of incidents with a lot of
| cynicism, but if you look at the road from street view, I can
| see how this would happen eventually.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This wapo article has much better photos of the site, if you
| have access to it.
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/09/21/north-carol...
|
| I think these deep image links work even if you aren't a
| subscriber. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
| apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
| karussell wrote:
| It is a one-way bridge! Try swapping start+end and it will
| happily route over the bridge.
| recursive wrote:
| > Compare the satellite imagery from 2023, which clearly shows
| the bridge is out:
|
| Maybe it shows it, but I could definitely not call that
| "clearly", although that doesn't really matter anyway, as
| abundantly mentioned elsewhere.
| m463 wrote:
| I've always wondered why there wasn't more direct feedback built
| into any and every system like this.
|
| For example, why doesn't telsa have a direct feedback button,
| clearly marked for all. This would highlight problems with things
| on a map, things missing from a map, invalid, non-optimal or
| dangerous routing, and more?
|
| I've wondered this will all KINDS of systems. why not flag
| suspicious product or restaurant reviews? Why can't you highlight
| spelling or grammatical errors directly in the kindle app - as
| errors?
| namdnay wrote:
| https://www.google.com/help/terms_maps/
|
| > Actual Conditions; Assumption of Risk. When you use Google
| Maps/Google Earth's map data, traffic, directions, and other
| content, you may find that actual conditions differ from the map
| results and content, so exercise your independent judgment and
| use Google Maps/Google Earth at your own risk. You're responsible
| at all times for your conduct and its consequences.
|
| this seems very obvious to me? i imagine "state of north carolina
| sued for allowing a dangerous abandoned bridge to stay connected
| to the public system" wouldn't make a nice juicy headline (and i
| imagine the state of north carolina has less money to throw at
| random lawsuits)
| mrtksn wrote:
| It's obvious but probably you can't escape responsibility by
| just writing it on the terms and conditions if you are
| responsible for something. What if they put "we are not
| responsible for anything, use your judgement" on every product
| and sell dangerous products? I mean, IMHO they should be able
| to do that if they warn you properly(not just in the legal
| text) but that's just my opinion.
|
| Is Google Maps responsible? I don't know but I can imagine
| someone claiming it due to the way information is displayed on
| the UI. Google maps always shows the information from position
| of authority, they are always very sure about the information
| they have and you don't have a clue about how certain they are
| bout what they tell you. I had multiple situations where Google
| Maps will direct me very confidently to roads that don't exist
| and once I had to stop and investigate if the road that Google
| Maps insist on is viable and the other time I had to turn back
| as the road conditions deteriorated from SUV-needed to T-80
| tank needed. Negligent local authorities combined with
| authoritative assistant who is wrong and can't tell its wrong
| can be dangerous.
|
| Maybe a UI with more clear communications is needed?
| aeurielesn wrote:
| I'm actually at odds at what's Google responsible for
| exactly. Google isn't paid by the county to provide this
| service nor Google Maps is a paid service.
|
| My first thought was it's the county's fault.
| mrtksn wrote:
| There can be multiple parties responsible, the county looks
| like definitely responsible(or not, if it's not an infra
| where they are responsible to maintain?) but Google can be
| too.
|
| Google Maps is not a free product at all, it's a commercial
| product provided for free as part of an ad business. It's
| free as the free soda with the hamburger.
| bmitc wrote:
| Google offers the service as instructions for how to get
| somewhere. Google and these other tech companies hide
| behind excuses that claim these systems are so complex and
| scaled that they can't possibly be responsible for when
| they're wrong. But it is _they_ , as in Google, that built,
| offer, market, and implicitly claim it all works, not the
| people. Then they cowardly bury in the terms and conditions
| that it can't be trusted.
|
| I am all for tech companies being held liable for what they
| market. Especially here, because at the end of the day,
| Google doesn't even care about providing you directions
| They just want your data that they can resell. But that's
| not how they market Google Maps.
|
| I also think the county should be responsible, but that is
| in addition.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Keep in mind, those protections are pretty standard for
| software in general.
|
| Most of the open source ecosystem would evaporate
| immediately if "SOFTWARE PROVIDED AS-IS" wasn't a
| legally-enforceable culpability abrogation.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's different when you're a corporation that makes $300
| million annually, plasters the service all over ads and
| commercials, and buries the "as-is" in however many pages
| of terms and conditions that constantly update, all the
| while making money off of the "customer".
| Bjartr wrote:
| Morally yes, but not legally.
| pixl97 wrote:
| No it is not. Print a map on a piece of paper. You follow
| it off a cliff. In what world is that the map makers
| fault?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh?
|
| If I print a map and sell it showing a bridge. Then later
| the bridge washes out in a flood, how in any way would
| the map maker be responsible if you're aware enough not
| to drive off a cliff. This case has nothing to do with
| any technology involved.
|
| Counties, in general under law, are excluded from most of
| these kinds of liabilities in most states. Probably why
| the family is going after Google, County is a dead end.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| What if I told you about the bridge collapse and then you
| reprinted the maps, but left the collapsed bridge on
| there?
|
| That is what the lawsuit is claiming. I still don't think
| Google is at any fault in this scenario, but it is a
| little surprising that the route still shows after
| several years of the bridge being out (and multiple
| reports to Google about it.)
| mrtksn wrote:
| When it's on paper, it's very clear that the information
| is not live updated. Also, that piece of paper wouldn't
| be giving instructions. The level of alertness and the
| expectations would be calibrated accordingly.
|
| In the case of Google Maps, the thing claims live data
| and gives you authoritative instructions like "turn
| left".
|
| People have tendency to follow instructions and trust the
| computer, so if the computer says something people try
| their best to do it. Combine that with the illusion of
| live data, there you have a disaster waiting to happen.
| After all, the device that knows how much traffic is
| there at this very moment at particular location must
| also know if there's a bridge or not, right?
| switch007 wrote:
| If I ever see a negative post about Google, and the top comment
| /isn't/ defending Google, I will eat my hat
| lenkite wrote:
| Yeah no - if multiple people reported this issue to Google Maps
| and no action was taken, then personally I consider Google
| eminently sue-able. I would say that most personal injury
| lawsuits would take this into account.
| Merad wrote:
| The bridge in question is about a mile from my house. I'm
| pretty sure the road it's on is not publicly maintained, as
| it's just a street within a neighborhood. And that's a
| neighborhood that doesn't have a HOA, so I don't know if anyone
| is actually legally responsible for maintaining the road or
| bridge.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| So is it obvious that the bridge is out? Did the incident
| occur at night, and was visibility poor? As much as I hate
| Google, I find it hard to believe they should be held
| accountable before whoever owns the road with a bridge to
| nowhere that isn't marked or blocked off.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| The article states that the accident occurred at 11pm, and
| there were no barriers to the bridge. A concrete barrier
| was put up _by local residents_ after the accident.
|
| It sounds like nobody wanted to put up any warnings,
| because they might then assume some responsibility for the
| bridge itself. Tragic.
| cwmma wrote:
| there where barricades but they had been taken down due
| to "vandalism"
| Merad wrote:
| The road is pretty steep on either side of the bridge and
| it's a small one lane (IIRC) bridge. At night I definitely
| think it could be difficult to see that the bridge was out
| until it was too late.
|
| Edit: According to articles linked elsewhere in the
| comments the bridge was privately owned and the owners are
| being sued along with Google.
|
| As far as ownership, I am no expert but I _think_ the land
| under the road would be government owned (not sure if
| state, county, or city) because there 's a public right-of-
| way to ensure houses in the subdivision have access to
| public roads. However in the absence of a HOA the property
| owners within the subdivision are collectively responsible
| for road maintenance. It's part of the paperwork when you
| buy a house. But I don't know if they're required to
| maintain it to a specific standard... And in this
| particular case the neighborhood in question is pretty
| middle class (middle class in a LCOL area). I'm guessing a
| bridge repair isn't cheap, so it's very plausible that the
| neighborhood literally couldn't afford it. This definitely
| seems like a thorny topic, not something where it's easy to
| lay the blame at the feet one individual or entity.
| turtlebits wrote:
| If it's private, it should mean there is no street sign or
| marked as private. I'd be curious how the driver even got
| onto the road.
|
| IMO road hazards should be the responsibility of the property
| owner, what if someone got lost or even used to road to turn
| around?
| Merad wrote:
| See my other comment WRT to ownership:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37602718
| petsfed wrote:
| I have been directed by google down roads marked "private".
|
| I have been directed by google down roads that weren't
| actually roads.
|
| When I was in Arches National Park, I noticed google trying
| to direct me to take an actual jeep trail instead of a
| paved road. Like, big sign at the turn out that said "high
| clearance, 4wd required. Do not attempt when wet" (the jeep
| trail actually crossed a river, which at that time was
| about 3 feet deep). And when i deliberately modified my
| path on my phone to not go down the jeep trail, within 2
| miles of driving, google maps helpfully interrupted its own
| directions to say "we've found a route that will save you
| 30 minutes. If you don't want to take the new route, press
| ignore", which directed me _back to the fucking jeep
| trail_.
|
| I feel like Google does have some culpability here, since
| they make it so hard to actually avoid hazards while still
| using their tool. Like, how is there not an option to just
| avoid dirt roads the way I can avoid toll roads? I don't
| dispute that it is ultimately the driver's responsibility
| to validate the program's outputs. But if the only way to
| use the app at all is to _not_ validate the outputs, then I
| don 't think a single line clause in the EULA is sufficient
| to shield google from liability.
| arp242 wrote:
| A few years back there was a story where Google Maps
| would frequently guide people through a steep narrow
| street which really wasn't intended for this kind of
| traffic, creating a dangerous situation for both drivers
| and residents because this road really wasn't designed or
| intended for heavy thoroughfare.
|
| Residents complained to Google. Google them to go pound
| sand and that there isn't anything they can do.
|
| Quite frankly I'm having a hard time explaining the
| difference between "knowingly putting people in a
| dangerous situation" and "accidentally putting people in
| a dangerous situation and then refusing to fix it". I
| guess it's easy to enough to ignore these kind of
| externalities if they're not happening at your front door
| every day... I can forgive the routing mistake, which is
| an understandable one to make. What I can't forgive is
| the "well, not our problem". If you're going to make a
| GPS guidance app then you also need to take
| responsibility for what it tells people. Mistakes are
| okay. Pretending mistakes have nothing to do with you is
| not.
|
| All of that said, I find it hard to really judge this
| situation based on the provided information; the key
| question is "could Google reasonably have done better?"
| However, in the past Google Maps has definitely
| demonstrated that it doesn't take these concerns very
| serious and it's 100% worth a serious investigation in
| both this specific siltation but also whether Google Maps
| in general takes enough reasonable precautions to prevent
| this kind of thing.
| jedberg wrote:
| There is always someone responsible. If it's private land,
| there is an owner of the land. If it's public land, then at
| the very least the county or city is responsible.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| Ethically? There are many people in that town partially
| responsible. There is no way I would live in a town for a
| year, where I knew a situation like that was in place,
| without stacking old cinderblocks or dragging a fallen tree
| across the road, on both sides. Sheesh. "Not my job" gone
| wild.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >There is always someone responsible.
|
| I think what you're trying to say and left off is "outside
| of the person who had the event occur with them"
|
| And in that case, no quite often state laws will absolve
| responsibility from any potential stakeholders.
| Agricultural liability laws in many midwestern states are
| an example of that.
|
| https://www.inwoodlands.org/new_indiana_law_limits_liabili/
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Well, the land is owned by Strip of Land Holdings 123. But
| they have a contractual relationship with Bridges 876 Inc
| to maintain the bridge, and the owners of Bridges 876 Inc
| are to be found at a PO box in the Cayman Islands. Hang
| around outside the post office down there long enough and
| I'm sure you'll see the owners pop up.
| jedberg wrote:
| No one would care about Bridges 876. They would sue Strip
| of Land Holdings 123 as the owner of the property, and
| SoLH123 would have to send someone to represent them in
| court. If they didn't, the would loose, and then loose
| their land in the judgement.
|
| Eventually the person would be made whole somehow, and
| the responsible person would be found.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| You are correct, but /u/cool_dude85 is making a movie
| reference to a chain of holding companies created to
| obfuscate ownership to avoid just this situation.
| dfdsafsadf2 wrote:
| > Actual Conditions; You owe me one million dollars.
|
| Counterpoint: For every person who reads this post, namdnay
| must mail me $1 million USD. By reading this post you agree to
| these terms.
| 7e wrote:
| Are you an attorney or judge?
| loco5niner wrote:
| He's suggesting that everyday people should just use their
| noggin, and that's basically what the terms are saying too.
| 7e wrote:
| That's a presumptuous statement. The crash occurred at
| night in very poor weather. It was likely impossible to see
| the missing half of the bridge under those conditions.
| Everyone already uses common sense. That's why it's called
| common sense. Negligence is something else, and we can't
| blame the victim without hearing all the facts here.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > impossible to see the missing half of the bridge
|
| If you can't see the road ahead as far as your stopping
| distance, you are negligent. If you are not watching the
| road ahead, you are negligent.
| Retric wrote:
| Headlights let you see objects on the road in time to
| stop, but don't necessarily allow you to distinguish
| holes.
|
| If that's the standard then driving at night is reckless
| behavior.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I stand by what I wrote. If you are overdriving your
| headlights, you are driving negligently. You're the
| driver, _you_ are responsible for looking where you 're
| going.
|
| No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
| Retric wrote:
| I agree overdriving your headlights is reckless, however
| remaining stationary isn't enough to distinguish one
| black void from another. This is a function of the limits
| on vision not speed.
| eggy wrote:
| Which is why the municipality should be liable for not
| properly closing off the road well before the bridge
| crossing, and putting a big, red and white reflective
| striped fence several feet before the edge visible from a
| distance after the road closing as a second
| barrier/sighted warning.
| Retric wrote:
| In theory absolutely, but that doesn't mean you can
| actually sue.
|
| "In United States law, state, federal and tribal
| governments generally enjoy immunity from lawsuits.[48]
| Local governments typically enjoy immunity from some
| forms of suit, particularly in tort."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you can't see, pull over. This isn't rocket science.
| Retric wrote:
| If you ever drive at night then you're discarding your
| own advice here.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Not at all. I slow down when I can't be sure of the road
| ahead.
| Retric wrote:
| Going slow isn't enough.
|
| Unless you stop, get out, and poke the road with a stick,
| you frequently can't tell if the road is there. Or at
| least frequently compared to how far people drive.
|
| It's ignorable because the road is so infrequently
| missing not because you can always see it.
| notacoward wrote:
| Yes, everyday people should use their noggins, but there
| are things that go beyond what those everyday people would
| expect and anyone who does those things can still be
| liable. Courts have upheld this "reasonable expectation"
| standard again and again and again, literally every day,
| and it's not hard to see why. If "use your noggin" was a
| foolproof defense, explicitly in the TOS or otherwise,
| companies literally couldn't be held liable for _anything_.
| That 's clearly insane, so the line has to be drawn
| somewhere else and it has been drawn at reasonable
| expectation.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Terms&conditions are not law, and deciding whether 'terms
| clearly say X' actually implies 'X' (or if those are just
| empty words, as many clauses are) does take some legal
| knowledge.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| If the article is correct google have had for years warnings
| that this bridge has collapsed. Now - of course the ultimate
| responsibility is to the driver because - you have eyes. Then
| it is to the myriad of people who have not put a traffic cone
| there. And lastly is to google for not updating their database.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| > Then it is to the myriad of people who have not put a
| traffic cone there.
|
| This. I find it incredible and sad.
| zyang wrote:
| It's up to the judicial process to decide if Google is liable
| or not. But in my opinion the county is most at fault here for
| not blocking off the road. It's an odd choice to go after
| Google since they have world class lawyers and the case would
| open a floodgate of lawsuits for Google.
| danaris wrote:
| In another article I read about this earlier today, it said
| that the signs blocking the bridge had been removed by
| vandals.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It may be worth it to the family to take the gamble that
| Google would rather settle than go through a discovery
| process that puts their auditing process (a trade secret) in
| the public record.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Google is a deep-pockets target that doesn't have the problem
| of the range of immunities that must be navigated around in
| suing a state.
|
| Not at all an odd target.
| bleah1000 wrote:
| But that assumes that Google would settle. Without that
| happening, you are looking at years before getting a
| result, thousands of dollars of attorney fees and a high
| likelihood that if they lost they would appeal.
|
| This might be more of an emotional lawsuit than a logical
| one.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But that assumes that Google would settle.
|
| Which is a not unreasonable assumption. It doesn't take
| much before Google's cost outstrip the cost of
| settlement, and even if it were to prevail in court it
| probably wouldn't recover costs
|
| > Without that happening, you are looking at years before
| getting a result, thousands of dollars of attorney fees
| and a high likelihood that if they lost they would
| appeal.
|
| Yes, it will take time if the other side doesn't settle,
| that's rather the norm in lawsuits. But its reasonably
| likely there is a contingency fee arrangement in olace,
| meaning the lawyers get paid with and out of any
| settlement or judgement.
|
| > This might be more of an emotional lawsuit than a
| logical one
|
| That's always possible, but you haven't really done much
| to argue for it being likely.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >> But that assumes that Google would settle. >Which is a
| not unreasonable assumption
|
| Not sure about Google, but companies like Walmart never
| settle. For them it's better to have the lawyers tell you
| "Oh, you're going after Wally, well, that's going to be
| the next 10 years of your life wasted", then it is to
| worry about the per litigation costs.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Not sure about Google, but companies like Walmart never
| settle.
|
| This is simply false. While Walmart is aggressive, they
| do settle. What Walmart does which masks this is, where
| they have they have the leverage to do so, as they
| usually do with individual plaintiffs that actually are
| concerned about financial compensation, insist in strict
| confidentiality terms in settlements which makes them
| unlikely to be reported. But even that doesn't cover
| everything, and there are noteworthy publicly reported
| settlements.
|
| https://www.millerandzois.com/wal-mart-injury-
| settlements.ht...
| Yeul wrote:
| No cure no pay lawyers fix that. Some ambulance chasing
| law degree scumbag will take the bet.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Maybe they're hoping Google will settle out of court. If they
| settle, they avoid the risk of setting the legal precedent
| they don't want. That might be worth the money to them.
|
| The family could also just be doing it on principle. If
| Google had made the updates, the man would probably be alive
| today because he wouldn't have known about this (non-)route,
| so they may feel like Google shares some blame. The lawsuit
| and/or bad PR could motivate Google to make some kind of
| change, like better training or better support in their
| problem reporting system for tracking and prioritizing
| corrections related to safety.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Not sure what legal precedent it could set. A driver is
| ultimately responsible for where he drives. "Someone told
| me to drive into that wall" isn't going to stand in any
| court.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| It sets one precedent if you win and another if you lose.
| No matter how strong your case, there's never a guarantee
| you will win.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Google is just one of the parties they are suing, it looks
| like they are also suing the local government and the
| landowner (the bridge is on private property).
| jedberg wrote:
| When you file a lawsuit you generally name anyone you can
| possibly imagine being associated, and then let the courts
| dismiss people.
|
| I've been named in a lawsuit before, where my contractor's
| employee was suing my contractor for non-payment on a job
| (not my job), but named me in the case anyway since my job
| was going on at the same time. I just went to court prepared
| to defend myself and the first thing the judge did was ask
| why I was named in the suit.
|
| Then I was promptly dismissed from the suit but asked to stay
| as a witness.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Would we be discussing it here on HN if Google were not named
| in the suit? Would anyone other than the local newspaper have
| written about it? Probably not.
|
| But there are currently over 1200 articles on this, including
| national and international coverage, and that publicity is
| probably very helpful for the lawsuit.
| dundarious wrote:
| People who don't have/use Google Maps may die in a similar
| way, given the lack of physical infrastructure to block the
| route. What does increased notoriety about a mistargeted
| lawsuit against Google do to assist?
|
| To be clear, I think Google is not without blame, but the
| primary apportionment belongs to local road/bridge
| management, because fixing Google Maps alone would in no
| way be sufficiently safe, but fixing the physical
| infrastructure of the route would.
| bacchusracine wrote:
| >an odd choice to go after Google since they have world class
| lawyers
|
| Steve Dallas lawsuit?
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Waivers don't protect against negligence.
| dathinab wrote:
| yes but the neglience was presenting a route which doesn't
| exist
|
| which isn't anywhere close to killing someone
|
| what killed that person is whatever allowed them to drive
| onto a collapsed bridge without noticing it
|
| where I live this bridge would have been fenced of, and not
| just with some easy to remove by trolls fences but (with
| construction vehicles) movable concrete barricades or larger
| wooden logs depending on the area
| danaris wrote:
| I think that it's very reasonable to argue that explicitly
| telling someone to take steps that will kill them is, _at
| best_ , grossly negligent.
|
| The fact that it required other, completely unrelated,
| lines of defense to fail for the victim to be _able_ to
| follow those steps all the way does not in any way absolve
| Google of responsibility here.
| freejazz wrote:
| >this seems very obvious to me?
|
| That the terms say that? Who is disputing that? It's completely
| besides the point of whether or not that term carries legal
| wait. You can't have someone waive away your duty to not be
| grossly negligent.
|
| Speaking of obvious:
|
| "The Tuesday court filing includes email records from another
| Hickory resident who had used the map's "suggest an edit"
| feature in September 2020 to alert the company that it was
| directing drivers over the collapsed bridge. A November 2020
| email confirmation from Google confirms the company received
| her report and was reviewing the suggested change, but the
| lawsuit claims Google took no further actions."
|
| They had been on notice for ~2 years that they were directing
| people towards a collapsed bridge. I find it concerning the way
| some people respond to this issue, and the general concept of
| negligence, as it speaks towards their views on how we should
| treat others.
| travoc wrote:
| But the automation that declined the edit suggestion saved
| Google 37 cents in manual labor.
| jtbayly wrote:
| It would be interesting if this was the case that blew up
| Google's model of forcing everything to be "decided" by a
| computer, refusing to allow humans to be involved.
| devmor wrote:
| I think this is far more on the shoulders of the local DOT for
| not having barricaded the roadway to begin with.
|
| However, anecdotally I once had Google direct me to take a right
| turn onto "Old Military Canal Road" off the side of an unlit,
| narrow, low bridge with no guardrails in the middle of the night.
| If I had not been extremely observant, I would have driven my car
| about 5 feet down into "Old Military Canal" and totaled it,
| possibly injuring and/or killing myself.
|
| I understand that there are terms & conditions that supposedly
| indemnify Google from these sort of mistakes, but I wonder if
| there is perhaps at least a moral duty for google to add some
| kind of UX alert when a user is being instructed to take routes
| that users do not normally take.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| There's a ford in one of the public parks I grew up near. When
| the river is low, it's a slightly damp concrete pad. When it's
| not, there can be several inches of fast flowing water. The
| warning signs aren't ideal because it's connected to a large
| parking lot.
| mhandley wrote:
| Doesn't it at least seem odd that Google can't infer a road is
| impassable, when no vehicle it has been navigating has ever made
| it across the bridge in the last nine years? Seems like something
| that shouldn't be impossibly hard for them to figure out.
|
| Edit: or maybe they have inferred it's impassible, but
| occasionally send someone that way to see if it's been fixed?
| crazygringo wrote:
| It does seem extremely odd.
|
| I always assumed Google detects things like temporary road
| closures because suddenly nobody is crossing a common road, in
| order to reroute people.
|
| Does it not? And if it does, wouldn't it be doing the same
| thing to detect more permanent road closures in less busy
| locations?
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