So a man owns a private cabin at the end of an unpaved road. A major mapping app decided his driveway was a public shortcut to a national park, routed thousands of cars through his property, ignored over forty error reports and certified legal letters, and then one of those cars crashed into his retaining wall in the dark. Now the driver is suing him for failing to maintain a public thoroughfare. The road that is not public. That he has been desperately trying to close for eight months.
The lawsuit is audacious in a way that almost circles back around to impressive. The driver was speeding down a clearly marked private road at night, crashed into a stationary wall that has existed on private property since before any app decided to make it a tourist route, broke his leg, and is now arguing that the wall was an unmarked hazard on a public thoroughfare. The only thing that made it a thoroughfare at all was the app that the cabin owner has been begging to fix for the better part of a year.
The tech company’s liability here is not subtle. They created the traffic problem, ignored documented attempts to correct it, and continued routing strangers onto private property after being formally notified that it was private property. That is not a mapping glitch that got cleaned up in a patch. That is forty error reports and certified letters going nowhere while cars pile up on someone’s driveway every weekend.
He needs a premises liability attorney with experience in corporate negligence, and he needs one immediately. The tech company is the most logical target for indemnification given that they created the condition that made any of this possible. His homeowners insurance threatening to drop him for a situation entirely caused by a third party’s error is its own separate fight, but the mapping company is where this story actually starts and where most of the legal pressure needs to land.
Author: Kayitsi.com
