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.

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.