Pedestrian Sues Google for Bad Directions

Daily Mail

Deer Valley Drive as seen in Google Street View, 

without a pedestrian in sight

A woman is suing Google, the search engine, claiming its maps function gave her walking directions that led her on to a major highway, where she was hit by a car.

The lawsuit seeks more than $100,000 (£70,000) in damages.

Lauren Rosenberg used Google Maps on January 19, 2009, via her Blackberry, to get directions between 96 Daly Street, Park City, Utah, and 1710 Prospector Avenue, Park City, Utah.

Google provided these, telling her as part of the route to walk for about half a mile along the calm-sounding Deer Valley Drive.

But Deer Valley Drive is a section of Utah State Route 224, a busy rural highway without pavements. One stretch is blocked by a noise barrier that pushes pedestrians closer to the roadside.

And Rosenberg wasn’t warned about this, putting Google directly at fault in the accident, the case claims.

After walking on to the highway, Rosenberg was struck by a car. The driver, Patrick Harwood, is also named in the suit.

The case, Rosenberg v Harwood, was filed in Utah, in the U.S. District Court’s Central. Both Harwood and Google are being sued in the same case, for damages ‘in excess of $100,000’.

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, which only has a small screen, so does not include the warning.

Others have pointed out that Rosenberg might have been best served by her own eyes after she reached a T-junction and found herself confronted with an obviously unsafe walk.

Microsoft's Bing has a similar warning when mapping the same path: ‘Caution, this route may be missing sidewalks or other pedestrian paths.’

The problem is that you only get 320x480 pixels on a Blackberry screen and if Google needed to put warnings on its Maps pages, there'd hardly be any room for a map.

Instead, Google has to rely on people using common sense and lessons they learned at school – at least until their maps become 'fool proof'.