Tech company faces negligence lawsuit after Philip Paxson died from driving off a North Carolina bridge destroyed years ago
Discuss!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Paxson, who was 47 and from Hickory, North Carolina (about 60 miles north-west of Charlotte), was returning home from his daughter’s ninth birthday before the accident, his mother-in-law wrote in a post on Facebook.
In addition to Google, the Paxson family’s lawsuit names a number of private property management companies who were responsible for the land where the crash happened and for surrounding plots, according to the Associated Press.
Lawyers for the Paxsons allege that several people have tried to flag the washed-out bridge to Google and have included email correspondence between a Hickory resident who tried to use the “suggest an edit” feature in 2020 to get the company to address the issue.
In 2020, an 18-year-old Russian motorist froze to death after he and a friend were stranded in a vehicle for a week after following a Google Maps route through Serbia’s “road of bones”.
In 2019, a truck driver in Jakarta, Indonesia, drove off a cliff after following a Google Maps route that was only meant for motorcycles, the Straits Times reported.
In 2015, 51-year-old Zohra Hussain died in a fiery car accident in Indiana after her husband, who was following his Nissan Sentra’s built-in GPS, drove off an unmarked toll road that led to a demolished bridge.
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In 2020, an 18-year-old Russian motorist froze to death after he and a friend were stranded in a vehicle for a week after following a Google Maps route through Serbia’s “road of bones”.
The road of bones is not in Serbia, it’s in Russia.
Safety regulations are written in blood, warning labels are written by morons (usually)
When I think of the situations that occur in everyday traffic and how people behave there, completely without google being involved, I am absolutely not surprised at the level of carelessness that radiates from such events. Though it could also be my lower trust in services like google maps because I have a deeper knowledge of the technology behind it than most people. There may be people who think of google maps as some kind of authority that has proven to not be wrong at any time…
If google had enough information and time to correct such map errors and did not out of neglect, they may still be held accountable. And I think that this is a good thing.
Ridiculous. If you blindly drive over a bridge that isn’t there because a map says so, you’re an idiot. Congratulations for the Darwin Award.
Did you read the article?
neither the destroyed bridge nor the road leading to it had any barriers or warning signs to alert drivers of the hazard.
It was also raining and at night, so he likely had no way to know the bridge was gone until it would have been too late to stop.
So sue the county or who ever is in charge of erecting the barriers. Still not the map’s fault.
The bridge broke down years ago. Google is absolutely also at fault for sending someone down it, along with whoever didn’t have warnings up. Multiple entities can be at fault here.
Doesn’t sound like google’s fault, does it?
The article even mentions that other entities are sued but oh that sweet headline.
Yeah, suing google makes as much sense as suing the car maker for not making the car fly.
The bridge was broken years though, so Google should not have been using it for routes. The country is definitely at fault for not having signs up, but Google isn’t blameless in this.
Yes so this is the on the authority that owns the road if people have been telling Google about it surely the municipal or state or whoever maintains the road was informed and should have made effort to block it off or mark the road as private or whatever. If it is a private road you are still liable if it appears to be access to your property (say for delivery drivers to your mailbox)
If you can’t stop within the range of visibility, you’re driving faster than road conditions allow. That part is on the driver. The lack of barriers or warnings is on the municipality.
If you blindly drive over a bridge that isn’t there because a map says so, you’re an idiot.
He was thinking fourth-dimensionally.
We had this years ago…
We do so much for stupid people that some times it feels like if we do any more, we’ll lose our freedom and quality of life. There’s always going to be outliers and we should just be impressed they made it as far as they did. We can’t cater to them for everything.
How are you going to lose freedom or quality of life if Google is forced to maintain its services and provide you with better information?
counterpoint. google blindly accepts any change suggested by users leading to MUCH worse outcomes, or thoroughly investigates each request, GLOBALLY I might add, consuming more resources than exist in all the company.
or we just accept that maps are sometimes wrong and use our fucking eyes while driving
