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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.

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"

> 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:

"Typically, barricades are in place to prevent drivers from crossing the bridge, North Carolina State Highway Patrol said. But the barricades had been removed after being vandalized and were missing at the time of Paxson’s wreck."

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

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

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.

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.

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://...

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

> 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.

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