Here in Brazil, with car culture having basically killed the trains over the last 70 years, it is not very common to live with cool intersections that is, places where streets or roads intersect with train lines. Still, this is a very common occurrence in the rest of the world, and it is yielding a certain headache to technology companies.
The information is from Political: About three years ago, an accident killed an engineer and injured dozens of people after a road driver broke into a railroad crossing and collided with a passenger train in California (United States). Shortly thereafter, traffic safety authorities began to appeal to the Google, Apple, Microsoft and to other companies that maintain map platforms: expressly signal the cool crossings in their services.
The problem: Almost three years later, none of them made any particular effort to do so.
According to National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB, the US traffic safety agency), one of the main reasons for the 2016 crash was that the driver of the road was disoriented in an area he did not know; He broke into the intersection believing he had the preference. According to the agency, if map platforms would more accurately indicate areas of cool intersections, such incidents could be avoided.
The NTSB, analyzing this incident and noting that hundreds of people die of such occurrences every year in the US, has notified a number of companies of the need to intensify the crossbreeding markings. In both Apple, Google and Microsoft were targeted by the campaign; other manufacturers and developers, such as TomTom, Garmin, MapQuest and UPS, also received the appeal of the organ.
Of these, only two responded to the NTSB: TomTom has stated that it has already included crossroads in its maps for over a decade. Google, for its part, was less collaborative, saying it was afraid to make the experience of its maps too full of information and "below ideal" for its users. Apple and the other companies kept quiet.
If anything about this changes in the near future, we will have to wait and see.
via The Verge
