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Google was informed, from what I understand, multiple times over the course of two years that this route was no longer valid, and did nothing.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.
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.
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.)