Pedestrian Follows Google Map, Gets Run Over, Sues 699
Hugh Pickens writes "The Toronto Star reports that a Utah woman is suing Google for more than $100,000 in damages, claiming its maps function gave her walking directions that led her onto a major highway, where she was struck by a car. Lauren Rosenberg sought directions between two addresses in Utah about 3 kilometers apart and the top result suggested that she follow a busy rural highway for several hundred meters. The highway did not have sidewalks or any other pedestrian-friendly amenities, and Rosenberg was struck by a car. Rosenberg filed suit against both the driver of the car that struck her and Google, claiming both carried responsibility in her injury. Her lawyers claim Google is liable because it did not warn her that the route would not offer a safe place for a pedestrian to walk. Google has pointed out that the directions Rosenberg sought come with a warning of caution for pedestrians, but Rosenberg claims that she accessed the Maps function on her Blackberry mobile device, where it did not include the warning."
Re:So.... (Score:3, Informative)
As Clint Eastwood* says (Score:2, Informative)
"If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster."
*And Happy Birthday, Clint!
walking directions (beta): use caution (Score:1, Informative)
"walking directions (beta): use caution"
that's the exact text once you start point by point directions on the iPhone... I assume it's the same on her blackberry
Whatever happened to common sense? (Score:5, Informative)
Really... jeeze... What ever happened to common sense. If it looks dangerous... it probably is. If her Blackberry told her to insert her arm into an industrial shredder would she have done that as well?
Take a look at this... this is the road in question... [google.com] There was plenty of room on the left side of the street to walk without being anywhere near the road.
I really hope this gets thrown out of court. People need to take responsibility for their own stupidity.
Re:So.... (Score:3, Informative)
Where I am the major highways only run to areas that are far enough apart that you couldn't really walk along a highway to any meaningful destination. It is very much illegal to walk or ride a bike on them.
Kayaking to Japan (Score:2, Informative)
(See the directions from the US to Japan in Google Maps)
Re:For serious? (Score:5, Informative)
Caution: If you are undergoing fluid immersion, avoid breathing temporarily to avoid drowning.
Re:Same Thing Happened to Me (Score:1, Informative)
It already has that feature:
Hover the cursor over the blue line
press and hold the button the computer regards as the left mouse button
move the cursor to the detour point to use
Route will now use the indicated waypoint (black circle) to calculate the route. :P
Oncoming Traffic Re:For serious? (Score:1, Informative)
City folk indeed. Despite being raised in the city I still managed to pick up the 'common knowledge' that
a) Highways are dangerous
b) You walk on the shoulder opposite the flow of traffic (so you can see what's coming).
Hell, my city [google.ca] barely even has a highway in it!
Re:So.... (Score:1, Informative)
in utah if there is no sidewalk or shoulder, it is legal but you must
walk against the direction of traffic. (as per normal.)
http://le.utah.gov/~code/TITLE41/htm/41_06a100900.htm [utah.gov]
but from the pictures (in tfa), there is a shoulder on the
side she should have been walking on.
nonetheless, the driver is likely liable:
http://le.utah.gov/~code/TITLE41/htm/41_06a100600.htm [utah.gov]
Link at article more useful with StreetView (Score:2, Informative)
The link with the StreetView images [searchengineland.com] make the situation all the more plain: she's an idiot. For A) deciding to walk along a busy highway that in satellite images [google.com] and StreetView [google.com] clearly did not have sidewalks, which would have been obvious on the ground too, B) apparently being too clueless to stay on what narrow, non-sidewalk area did exist adjacent to the asphalt -- it looks wide enough to me that if you valued your life there would be room to stay off the road, and C) apparently too clueless to realize that there is indeed a walking/biking trail running parallel along Deer Valley Drive that she walked right past along her route [google.com] (the entrance at the corner of Iron Horse Drive and Bonanza Drive). note the cyclist [google.com]. The path was a few steps off the road, and it even has a tunnel under the highway to avoid crossing at the busy intersection. The trail is used frequently enough that you can clearly see people walking/riding all along it in the satellite images.
Re:This story is made up (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whatever happened to common sense? (Score:5, Informative)
"Take a look at this... this is the road in question... [google.com] There was plenty of room on the left side of the street to walk without being anywhere near the road."
It's much worse than that. There's a walking/cycling trail that parallels most of her route, if the route indicated on the map is correct. Take a look [google.com]. In many cases it was only a few steps from the road. She could SEE a safe, non-car route paralleling hers, but did not avail herself of it. From the described route, she walked right past the entrance to the trail [google.com] and stayed on the road. She took the "industrial shredder" option by following the blue line instead. Maybe you could fault Google for not pointing out the trail, but it was RIGHT THERE in plain sight. No, I'll stay on the busy road with no sidewalk.
I'm sure the locals and the municipality are saying "Why the !#%!%$! did we build these stupid trails if people aren't going to use them?"
Re:For serious? (Score:3, Informative)
Compared to Europe, sidewalk/walkway consistency and layout in America is atrocious as it is
Are you joking? I just got back from a holiday that included a few days pushing a stroller & my toddler around the sidewalks of Paris. In no particular order you've got to struggle with cars parked on the sidewalk (and/or agressively driving up in front of you on the sidewalk), unmarked random sidewalk construction sites, odd mixtures of cobblestones, randomness of curb ramps, sidewalks that slope towards the street at such an angle that you feel you're perpetually pushing the stroller uphill and sidewalks that are so narrow two people that can barely pass. By contrast, sidewalks in a city like Chicago are a breeze...
Re:For serious? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oncoming Traffic Re:For serious? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oncoming Traffic Re:For serious? (Score:3, Informative)
No. You are supposed to walk so that you face oncoming traffic.
Re:For serious? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:For serious? (Score:5, Informative)
Paris has a disadvantage compared to Chicago...history. Paris was a city when Chicago was a marsh full of wild onions.
Re:For serious? (Score:3, Informative)
Paris has a disadvantage compared to Chicago...history. Paris was a city when Chicago was a marsh full of wild onions.
And all the 1300 years before that too.
Chicago got its name 1800. Paris got a capital city in 508.
Re:Oncoming Traffic Re:For serious? (Score:2, Informative)
If you are a bicyclist going 15 mph and you suffer a collision with a motor vehicle going 35 mph, there is a very significant difference in the amount of force exerted by the impact depending on whether you are going against traffic (50 mph) or with traffic (20 mph).
The difference for a pedestrian is negligible, and therefore it is preferable to be facing traffic, in order to potentially foresee a collision and move to avoid it.
- RG>
Re:For serious? (Score:2, Informative)
It's still there for Australia to US (via Japan and Hawaii).
Re:Oncoming Traffic Re:For serious? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For serious? (Score:5, Informative)
if Google had told her jump on a bridge...
So, *this* is why they removed "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean -- 3462 miles" as part of the route to go from Boston, MA to London, UK! ;-)
Paul B.
Yeah, but you still get to kayak 5404km across the Pacific Ocean [google.com] when going from Toyko to Sidney. (step number 48)
Re:For serious? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia has an article that goes into greater detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_judgment [wikipedia.org]
Re:For serious? (Score:3, Informative)
In the UK it's at the judges discretion - I believe that's the case in the US also.
But you're right in the sense that very very light grey is white, and very very dark grey is black, for practical purposes.
Re:Just when you thought McCoffee suit was too muc (Score:1, Informative)
And here's where we learn that people are ignorant about lawsuits. See, in that particular example, McDonald's was shown to be serving their coffee hotter than any of their competitors and...they were aware of how many burns it caused and how much greater the extent of injury was than if they lowered their required temperature a few degrees.
So what, you think a restaurant chain as big as McDonalds with a corporate policy shouldn't be held responsible, shouldn't be asked to give consideration to people being injured by their product?
Sorry, but I disagree.
Whether or not Google is as liable, I don't know, but their page did leave out some information that they saw fit to include in another format.
It's something I'd certainly consider.
Re:For serious? (Score:3, Informative)
And we're not just talking about cities, either. Imagine I want to go from one town to another (I live in Germany) without taking either a car or a train - let's say I want to take a bike (or perhaps walk, although obviously, that'll only work if the two towns aren't that far from each other in the first place). I can do that; I can't follow the Autobahn, of course, but all "regular" federal/state/county roads have paved sidewalks for pedestrians and bikers (separated from the actual road by a green strip). The only exceptions are the tiniest rural roads, the kind that only have one lane for both directions where you can't go faster than 20 mph at most anyway and where you'll probably never encounter another car, but there, you can bike or walk on the road, anyway.
I don't know what it's like in the USA, of course.
Of course. And the reality is that only Germans and other rich white Europeans REALLY care about roads on a deep fundamental level. It is probably safe to assume that other countries populated mostly by relatively wealthy (ask anybody in Africa) and racially-advantaged people have similar benefits, but my lady who grew up in various parts of Europe tells me that many of the roads are narrow lanes with barely enough room for two Minis to pass. So this is going to depend very much on where you are. The same is true of the USA; in bumfuck nowhere, there are no sidewalks. Where I live (Kelseyville, CA) many of the streets are dirt: You can literally turn off the highway and directly onto a dirt street, which connects through four or five other dirt streets before you see pavement again. A small handful of the largest roads have sidewalks, but for the most part, they are absent. Then again, so is the pavement. Where I'm from (Santa Cruz) almost all of the roads have sidewalks, and they're usually in pretty good repair, though they were trashed from 1989 to about 1999 due to quake damage from the Loma Prieta event. A 7.1 has a way of re-settling concrete and tarmac alike.
In much of Europe, there's no room for sidewalks; in much of the US, there's no inclination. Keep in mind that we have more cars than people in our most populous state (California) which also tends to be where people have to drive the furthest to get places, outside of Texas.
I've been there once, and found that I couldn't walk from the house of the friend I visited to the Target supermarket that was literally two hundred meters away - there were no sidewalks, no pedestrian crossings to cross the busy road separating the two, no pedestrian bridges, no pedestrian tunnels, nothing. We had to take the car. We ended up going on a trip through three states (Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio), too, and I noticed a distinct lack of sidewalks everywhere.
Most of those places, you don't need one, because we have so much more room here. The USA literally has three states which are over 60% managed by the bureau of land management, which manages places nobody wants to live. Mostly people rent the right to graze cattle there but there's also some (probably illegal) oil and gas wells, and plenty of periodic timber harvesting (read: clear-cutting) A friend of mine lives on a highway and has no other vehicular path out of her house, but she can WALK to the back of the property, pass the fence, and get to another road. If you live across a freeway (no pedestrian access) from where you want to go, sure, you might have to legally go the long way around. But given our low population densities there's no point to building foot bridges. They have 'em over the Interamericano in Panama, by way of comparison: But practically everyone there is on public transportation, and they have them next to bus stops, so there's actually people to use them.
Long story short, your friend lived someplace unsuitable for a human. Only businesses belong right on freeways. Freeways are something of an abomination, but that's what you get when you give your auto companies free rein to buy and terminate profitable public transportation concessions.
From Los Angeles, Walking down center of road. (Score:2, Informative)