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.
“there were no barriers or warning signs along the washed-out roadway” for a road which was destroyed 9 years before.
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 What if someone drove through there using an offline satnav with outdated maps?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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
"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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Living with the graffiti seems like a strictly lesser problem than living with a road ending in a missing bridge.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
Sometimes they have too much work and contract some jobs to private paving contractors. The roads they build are flat, smooth, and drain well.
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).
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?
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.
Hell non-locals might have driven off the thing without GPS help, depending on how the bridge looked from road-level
... 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.
> 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/...