Politico reports on the “inaction by giant tech companies” in the face of pleas from federal safety experts at the National Transportation Safety Board to “add information on the nation’s hundreds of thousands of railroad crossings to” their navigation apps. According to Politico, “nearly three years” after NTSB asked Apple, Google, and Microsoft to add these locations to their maps, “none of them has,” causing “frustration” among safety advocates as “hundreds of people die every year in collisions at U.S. railroad crossings, even as drivers increasingly rely on their smartphones’ GPS applications to tell them where to go.” Politico reports NTSB “said only two navigation-focused companies responded in ways that were satisfactory enough for the agency to close the recommendation,” Garmin and TomTom. In a statement, an FRA spokesperson said, “FRA is always willing to continue exploring the integration of grade crossing GIS data into navigation systems.”
From the news release of the American Association for Justice.
