Google sued for negligence after man died following map directions | Hacker News Reader

Google sued for negligence after man died following map directions

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140 pointsdimitropoulos299 comments

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)

Are you an attorney or judge?

He's suggesting that everyday people should just use their noggin, and that's basically what the terms are saying too.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

If you can't see, pull over. This isn't rocket science.

If you ever drive at night then you’re discarding your own advice here.

Not at all. I slow down when I can't be sure of the road ahead.

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.

If you can't see the road, you need to pull over and stop. This is not difficult to understand.

People see the edge of the road just fine, we even make a point of adding reflective paint to important bits of it. It’s the occasional black voids in the center which everyone just ignores as irrelevant.

Headlights being mounted so low results in long shadows from minor imperfections in the road surface which could hide huge holes. I can only assume you’ve become so used to this it doesn’t even occur to you that it’s an actual risk, thus proving my point.

PS: Hood geometry also plays a role here. There’s no point in casting light down at an angle that the driver would be unable to see it but that’s getting into the weeds.

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.

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.

Waivers don't protect against negligence.

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

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.

but in any sane road network this steps will _not_ kill anyone

because any sane road network doesn't contain death traps

it's not the responsibility of any 3rd party map service to close up death traps in a road network

it's the responsibility of whoever maintains that network

additionally I would say it's the responsibility of the same institute to publish information about road network changes like closures for maintenance or due to damages, I mean if even the people which sole job it is to maintain the road network don't know if a street is closed off or not (ignoring spontaneous changes) how is some 3rd party then supposed to know

(some exceptions to off road roads which frequently might be closed of by weather and in general often can't be taken with normal cars and always have warning signs etc.)

I mean would you have said the same if the bridge just broke a week ago? Or if it would have been a different card service like OpenStreetMaps? Or if they had used a card service where you need to buy map updates and they handn't done so yet?

The safety of traffic participant _must never ever_ depend on the navy system they are using.

But this also means that you hardly ever can fault a map service for stuff like that. ( I mean if it tries to rout your multi day road trip through a desert that's a different matter.)

> but in any sane road network this steps will _not_ kill anyone

...Which is why we don't say the victim was negligent. Unlike if, say, they'd just decided it would be a good idea to drive into a flooded street.

> it's not the responsibility of any 3rd party map service to close up death traps in a road network

It is the responsibility of any 3rd party map service to accept corrections to their maps submitted by users through their official process within a reasonable time frame. Unlike in this case, where Google had been told over the course of two years that this bridge was out, and they shouldn't route people over it.

> I mean would you have said the same if the bridge just broke a week ago?

No, I wouldn't, especially if no one had reported it to Google within that time. It would have been a tragedy, but not an easily-avoidable one like what actually happened.

> The safety of traffic participant _must never ever_ depend on the navy system they are using.

> I mean if it tries to rout your multi day road trip through a desert that's a different matter.

...So apparently you do think that the navigation system can sometimes be at fault for giving dangerous directions. You draw the line in a different place than where I do, which is fine—but you also appear to think that this means there is no line, which is a problem for being able to rationally discuss important topics like this.

Okay let's forbid map apps altogether then. Apple, google, open, whatever.

It's literally impossible to make one that is 100% reliable, and according to a bunch of geniuses on HN the app owner is responsible for morons who don't watch the road while driving, so the only logical conclusion is that we can't have nice things because some people are idiots.

Either you accept that it can't be perfect and people have to practice common sense, or you abandon the concept altogether.

It would be beyond absurd to hold Google responsible for this accident. The driver of the car is responsible for driving safely. He failed to uphold his responsibility and died.

This is why you have to drive more carefully. Nearly everyone is reckless in traffic. Huge amounts of people text while driving, tailgate, speed, etc. People get defensive about this kind of stuff, I think, because they know they could have made the same mistake. So admitting that this guy was an idiot is admitting that they are idiots and they don't like that.

Fact is, if you think this could possibly happen to an actually responsible driver, you don't understand what it means to be a responsible driver and you probably are not one. You're just a danger to yourself and others, like most drivers. A responsible driver would never keep going in a situation where their visibility was so bad thay they couldn't see a collapsed bridge. A responsible driver slows down, or even stops if necessary, when they can't see what's going on - because if you can't see what's ahead of you you can't keep driving. It's that simple, there are absolutely no exceptions. I don't give a shit how dark it was or how much it was raining or whatever else. If you can't see you stop the car. If you can see 5 meters ahead you go slow enough that you can stop in 2 meters. Yes, that's slow. Yes it's necessary. We're currently discussing a great example of why it is absolutely necessary.

Alternatively he could see just fine, he just wasn't looking. Which again, if you have to take your attention off the road you stop the car first. You can't keep driving while writing/reading/checking map etc. That is how you end up dead and famous for trying to drive over a collapsed bridge.

Or...we could cut out the victim blaming and reams of assumptions about just how awful and irresponsible the poor guy who dies was, and do what's actually being suggested, and require purveyors of these map apps to review and appropriately handle reports send to them of problems in a reasonable amount of time.

That's it. That's all that's being asked here.

Google was informed, from what I understand, multiple times over the course of two years that this route was no longer valid, and did nothing. Either they chose to ignore those reports, or the departments that should handle them are understaffed and they need to be mandated to hire more people there. (Just another instance where "we can't possibly employ enough people to make this healthy and still make a profit!" is not a response that we should be willing to accept.)

Sure, Google could have fixed it when they were notified. I do not know why they didn't. I assume there's a fairly decent reason, given the fact that Google has a vested interest in the accuracy of their maps app.

It is, however, irrelevant because similar things happen all the time and they can't prevent all of them.

You people don't really think about what you're asking for. These types of public reporting systems get abused all the time, not to mention user error. It takes an immense amount of work to go through reports and handle them. You can't just trust reports, so you either have to send someone out there to check it out for themselves or somehow verify the legitimacy of the reporter.

If they just accepted reports like this automatically you'd have 4chan drawing dicks by removing roads in Manhattan overnight.

So you want Google to go through all this trouble, just so a couple irresponsible drivers can't blame their map app when they kill themselves or others. Which they will do regardless of how accurate their maps and routes are.

Also, there is no "assumption about how irresponsible he was". If he drove responsibly, he wouldn't have gone off a bridge. It is that simple. The car only goes forward if you press the gas. He drove his car off a collapsed bridge. If you drive at a reasonable speed and pay attention to the road in front of you, that literally can not happen. Either he went too fast for the conditions or he wasn't paying attention. Or he had a stroke or the car malfunctioned I guess, in any case it has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with him.

And don't talk to me about "victim blaming". What an absolute bullshit term. If there was a person in the road rather than a collapsed bridge, would this guy still be the victim? No he wouldn't, he would be a murderer because if he can't see a whole ass collapsed bridge he certainly can't see a person wearing dark clothes. The only thing he's a victim of is his own recklessness. And maybe society's general nonchalance with regards to traffic safety.

"But it's hard" is not a sufficient defense.

Pay the money, make it work right. It's not like Google doesn't have the money to employ hundreds or even thousands of people to do this.

What kind of dream world are you living in? It's not a defense, it's a cost/benefit analysis. A map app that gives great routes for 99% of use cases is good enough, there's no point spending billions making it 0.1% better.

Google is not a charity. Google Maps earns them some amount of money, it is not sustainable to spend significantly more than that amount of money on it. They are a for-profit company, if a product is losing significant amounts of money they will kill it.

I'm not saying "this is what Google should decide for themselves". They should, of course, but they're amoral greedy bastards, so I know that ship has sailed.

I'm saying "this is what we as a society should mandate for Google".

Yeah, and I'm saying that's a shit idea because it won't fix any problems, it won't make Google Maps noticeably better and it'll probably just make Google drop the product altogether if it's too demanding to the point where Google stops making money from it.

Idiots who don't watch the road while driving will still be killing themselves and others.

> It's literally impossible to make one that is 100% reliable

That's not the standard. The standard is negligence. A waiver will protect your whitewater rafting company if someone injures themselves as part of a well-run tour. There is always a chance of mishap, the people who take these trips know it, and the waiver reminds them. It will not protect your company if the mishap occurred because you don't have enough life jackets for all the passengers or if you don't check your rafts for leaks before the trip.

>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.

But the automation that declined the edit suggestion saved Google 37 cents in manual labor.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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?

That isn't what happened.

Morally yes, but not legally.

I'm not sure. The analogy was downloading any old open source software with the as-is disclaimer vs Google saying their map system gives you live, up to date, directions and maps but then buries in terms and conditions a claim that they're not responsible.

If Google marketed Maps as "for information only", then that would be different.

I mean, it's point 3 in the terms of service. The bold text is Actual Conditions; Assumption of Risk.

I don't think we can call that "buried" unless we're operating under the legal theory that nobody is held accountable to terms and conditions at all anymore.

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.

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.)

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?

More customer support is needed. Article says bridge collapsed 9 years ago and people used the suggest edit feature and Google ignored it. Even if Google is not fully responsible for a person driving off a cliff, they are definitely negligent.

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.

>an odd choice to go after Google since they have world class lawyers

Steve Dallas lawsuit?

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.

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.

> 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.

>> 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.

> 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...

No cure no pay lawyers fix that. Some ambulance chasing law degree scumbag will take the bet.

> But that assumes that Google would settle.

See also: Google settles account settings lawsuit less than one week after being filed [pdf] (ca.gov) 174 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 3 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37582565

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

In another article I read about this earlier today, it said that the signs blocking the bridge had been removed by vandals.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is not Reddit.

>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/

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.

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?

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.

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.

As I've understood it, one reason they will refuse to do anything about those cases is because they can't really differentiate between "this is dangerous" and NIMBYs who don't want traffic down their quiet suburban street.

But also, if people are actively complaining about it, maybe that's a good indicator the street shouldn't be used as a thoroughfare in directions. Being a little bit faster isn't a good justification, and back road shortcuts aren't something that should be widely advertised to tourists and visitors.

I don't doubt there are some people complaining about the smallest of things, but "I don't want my quiet suburban street swamped with traffic" is not "NIMBY", and can certainly be very reasonable. Actually, they closed off one end of a street where I lived many years ago for pretty much this reason: people kept using it as a "shortcut". If you drive it's not very obvious, but with GPS it is.

Regardless, "we don't do it because it's hard" is just a different way of phrasing "we can't be arsed and don't care".

See my other comment WRT to ownership: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37602718

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.

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.

there where barricades but they had been taken down due to "vandalism"

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.

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.

> Then it is to the myriad of people who have not put a traffic cone there.

This. I find it incredible and sad.

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.

If I ever see a negative post about Google, and the top comment /isn’t/ defending Google, I will eat my hat

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.)

How has that road not been closed off?? That's the bigger news here.

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...

"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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

It looks like that's what they have there as of this year.

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.

Why isn't the bridge fixed?

Article says it was a privately maintained bridge and none of the relevant property owners fixed it.

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.

And in case anyone is wondering, OpenStreetMap got it right! https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=35.781302%2C%20-8...

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.

I don't see the issue. Was it fixed today?

Looks like it was indeed, in the past couple of hours. The entire road segment is now removed from Maps.

Nothing like a top comment on an HN front page story to get a company to take action, I guess.

Or maybe it was the coverage from multiple news organizations.

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.

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.

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).

This sometimes causes businesses to show up on the map at their owners' house instead of the actual location. Or a restaurant's name will change to Obscure Name Pty Ltd LLC Co Inc because that's the name of their holding company. The last one happens unusually often in Australia I feel like, maybe because people outside the country don't know how to validate the data.

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.

IIRC Waze supports almost exactly what you're describing. Which is kind of ironic since Waze is owned by Google.

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.

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

The kind of person that plows trough bushes likely overlap with the kind that would remove the roadblock.

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/...

> 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.

Indeed. Slapping a coat of beige paint over the graffiti has got to be easier than moving them.

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/...

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.

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.

maybe there was no neighborhood, just some abandoned area

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 10’ long, 32” high jersey barrier weighs 4,000 lbs

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

Municipalities, counties, and states can issue bonds to pay for infrastructure maintenance. An HOA can’t.

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...

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

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.

They're going after Google as well. Probably in the hopes that they're all found jointly and severally liable.

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

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?

And if you're an elderly person no one likes and are destitute, why should anyone else be forced to pay all your expenses?

I think you could equally say it's a nice gesture that people are allowed to use roads built on private land. Better than having to go around.

Ugh. That’s a pet peeve of mine. There are a fair number of farms to the west of me that once had passable farm roads. They’ve since been sold to developers who put up gated communities. So now you have to go around the whole development. None of these are high traffic areas - they aren’t preventing unsafe or noisy traffic, just being selfish.

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.

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.

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.

Ummm... The Rhine is the border between France and Germany. Strasbourg seems to be doing fine.

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.

All car mounted navigation systems have the driver confirm, paraphrased, that they are aware the save operation of the vehicle is their sole responsibility.

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.

Nine years, not two, according to the article.

Two years prior they were notified of the issue by email. Nine years prior the bridge collapsed.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

Google maps being wrong is not a danger, it is an inconvenience. Drivers are responsible for their own driving, no map app is perfect. It is completely unreasonable to assume or expect that Google Maps routes are always correct and safe.

So, when do you assume that Google isn't taking you over a collapsed bridge? Is it some of the times you cross a bridge? All the time? What to do you to confirm that Google's directions aren't actually ever hazardous, considering it's your own responsibility?

I don't need to assume anything. I just look at the road in front of me and if there's an obstacle I handle it. I adjust my speed so that I am in control. If Google tells me to drive onto a collapsed bridge I look ahead, see the bridge and choose to drive somewhere else instead because I'd rather not die. It could just as easily be an accident site or a downed tree or a person in the road or anything.

"But it was dark and blah blah" Irrelevant. If you can't see you can't drive. If you can see 10 meters ahead you go slow enough that you can stop in 5 meters. Yes that's slow. Yes it's inconvenient. Guess what. Dying or killing someone is slower and more inconvenient.

That's the end of this discussion. Everyone who thinks these rules are unreasonable are irresponsible drivers who shouldn't be allowed to drive. Yes, I know that's like 70% of drivers if not more. Doesn't change the fact that 99% of traffic accidents are caused by this kind of negligence and entirely avoidable if people would just pull their heads out of their asses and take proper responsibility.

Traffic kills more people than anything else in modern society. Nearly 4000 people every single day. That's 2-3 people every single minute. Multiple people probably died while you were reading this comment. Because people don't pay attention to the road, people don't appreciate the danger they are putting themselves and others in.

The fact that "you should drive safer" is in any way controversial is just a testament to how fucking dumb people are.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

if they were informed like the article says, I definitely think they should be liable to at least some extent.

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.

What you are responding to is prima fascia defective product liability. Selling a car with malfunctioning breaks is the purchasers problem? I'm shocked

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.

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)

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?

https://www.magicearth.com/ has OSM data for navigation and traffic information. In selected regions „official“ traffic data, otherwise crowd-sourced.

Google importing data from OSM would certainly raise some hairs in the legal department.

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.

How so? Do you mean Google's or OSM's legal department?

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.

Oh, like a copyleft/sharealike license? I didn't realize that. Thanks!

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.

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...

> 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! :-)

> Please come join us and help make it better! :-)

Huh. Interesting idea. What language are the frontend and backend in?

I was thinking about contributing to the map (using any of the editors [1]).

There are many "front-ends" [2].

A developer's view of some of the OSM infrastructure is at [3].

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors

[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM-based_servic...

[3] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Develop

>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?

Seriously, what on earth are you doing looking at your phone for a fucking stop sign.

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.

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.

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.

(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...

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.

Vandalizing the maps is why we can't have nice things, like community input on the maps.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

https://youtu.be/DOW_kPzY_JY?t=27

>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".

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?

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?...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Looking at the images, I'm confused how he drowned in that stream.

Look how high the banks are, and they're not undercut. The water must be getting up near that level with some amount of frequency to erode it like that.

This looks like a lowpoint for a fairly wide area, so this creek is collecting rainwater over a pretty substantial plain. The creek is also wider upstream and dramatically narrows under the bridge.

I wouldn't be surprised if that creek got 10 feet deep in heavy rain. There was a similar creek by my grandparents house that would get something like 15 feet deep and flood out the road.

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...

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.

Could have easily been at night and/or during a heavy storm with very low visibility

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.

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.

>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.

I think the mentioning of the pedestrian holds weight.

NYT has a picture of the site https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/us/google-maps-lawsuit-co... Its not just the absence of the road but there is a bush/tree growing on it.

If you are unable to see that and the height change from the end of the bridge you are in all likelihood unable to see somebody lying there. Not being able to come to a stop in time would apply to both.

Had he run somebody over the google maps excuse wouldnt fly.

> 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.

Well, people don't drive "from the air". They drive "from the ground".

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.

> 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.

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"

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://...

> 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.

> 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:

[1] https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/...

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/09/20/google...

It is a one-way bridge! Try swapping start+end and it will happily route over the bridge.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

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/...

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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)

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.

I agree they could definitely do a better job if they were benevolent, but keeping the whole world up to date is an immense task and it would be unsound to be punished for not being good enough at it.

This seems to be the bridge for context: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dtEvqS9iWUURUWM1A

Crazy it just has bushes blocking the way.

Crazy that someone would just drive through those bushes...

New age life insurance fraud?

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.

Were the bushes there in 2022? That picture is from 2023.

That picture is from May 2023. Seems safe to assume that additional barriers were added after the death in 2022.

the picture shows concrete barricades, too

it also seems to have been taken after the accident

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.

Some context. This road is entirely outside the city limits of Hickory (the city's zoning ETJ extends to one side of the creek in question). In NC, only cities and the state maintain roads, not counties. Outside of a city, almost all roads outside of a neighborhood are state "secondary routes," which have a number but are referred to by name. Some neighborhood roads are, and some aren't. This one is not, and apparently no private entity is actively maintaining it.

These "orphan roads" have become a statewide problem. Normally, the issue is not as severe as this--just a road that needs paving. The rule is that NCDOT will usually accept the road, but only after it is fully maintained. Wake County has a program to fund this and assess a special tax on the owners to repay the cost: https://www.wake.gov/departments-government/planning-develop...

Good image of bridge in 2021: http://gis.catawbacountync.gov/_TileStitch/printn7q2sl.jpg City Limits (dark) and ETJ (light): http://gis.catawbacountync.gov/_TileStitch/printszuxzi.jpg

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.

Staying left is legal though?

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.

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.

Updated link since the first variant would not point to the location accurately for some reason.

btw: Tesla navigation system is very likely based on OpenStreetMap data and not on Google (even though the map shown is a Google map)

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

Slightly offtopic but I find Apple maps to be way better than Google maps. Their lane by lane directions are amazing. Most of the time you don’t even have to look at the phone. Whereas google has their weird way of zooming in and out and often a bit late. My success rate of not missing a turn is way higher on Apple maps and than on Google maps.

"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.

This actually happens pretty often - people will start a long route that goes through somewhere remote with no cell service (mountains, deserts, the outback…), find it's wrong because it's out of date or a road is washed out, and then get stuck because they can't reroute.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/05/americas/brazil-wrong-directi...

"Waze app directions take woman to wrong Brazil address, where she is killed"

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.

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"

do you know that, or are you just guessing?

> I suspect/speculate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY

Man walks into a pole while reading TikTok, dies of excessive bleeding from head injruy. Family sues TikTok.

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.

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.

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

He died via drowning, so survived but just couldn’t get out of the vehicle in time.

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.

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. :/

There were already in place back in 2014 which you can observe on bing maps.

Granted it's not mentioned in FTA, but the barricade was removed at the time of the accident.

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/...

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