Google Maps leads three men to death as car plunges from incomplete bridge
economictimes.indiatimes.com
economictimes.indiatimes.com
Expecting Google to keep abreast of worldwide road damage is a bit of a stretch.
I don't know if it is a lack of inability for US states to do the paperwork/updates, or if google maps isn't incorporating the updates fast enough. I strongly suspect it is falling between the cracks at the state/local level.
I was once on a drive from LA to SF along CA-1/Cabrillo Hwy. I got as far as Ragged Pt, where the road was closed due to a landslide further up. It had been closed for six weeks. There were no signs announcing this anywhere on the way.
The naive approach is to expect a Single Source of Truth for roads, address points, and the like, but this turns out not to be true. The road network and address points are usually done on a per-county basis, each with its own standards (and boundaries), and gods help you if you expect that a road in County A that proceeds to County B to "line up" if you import data from each county. Sometimes, parcels are separate. Oh, and they'll use different projections and fields and whatnot.
Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation for my state had its own road network: fewer fields, often skipping the tiny roads entirely, irregularly updated.
This doesn't even begin to cover how bad the plats of a new neighborhood are versus reality, how infrequently updated and checked data is, height and weight limits for stretches of bridge and so forth.
Near where I live in California is a pedestrian path that is paved with asphalt. It is definitely not a street. Every few months someone like an Uber driver will misunderstand their directions and drive down it at about 30 mph, putting pedestrians at risk. I've sent emails to the city, but they seem to ignore it.
My problem with Google is that they have a wildly inaccurate maps that would destroy the reputation of any cartographer, yet they publish their app giving dangerous and deadly routes happily gathering the ad revenue without so much a warning that their directions are certain to result in a horrible outcome. I am still appalled, but all we can do is warn people and share stories.
Fascinating, but quite sad.
This issue may be amplified by the heavy seasonal pollution which reduces visibility substantially
Aside from the obvious fact that you're not looking for signs that the road in front of you simply stopped existing, your ability to recognize when it does also depends a lot on the geometry of the bridge, the color of the surface you're driving on, and the presence or absence of lane markings. In ideal circumstances, the road is perfectly flat and you're driving on a cement surface with clear lane markings, so the sudden darkness of the missing road is easy to distinguish from the relatively bright surface. But those circumstances are unlikely to be a reality.
Roads in general and bridges in particular are often peaked, leading to less visibility on the other side of the peak. This peak is often low enough that you'd see an oncoming car or a deer no problem, but the sudden end of the road would be blocked, and also the change in angle as you drive directs your headlights up and away from the surface of the road. Then there's also the possibility that you're driving on black asphalt which would be hard to distinguish automatically from the back of "there's nothing at all for my lights to reflect off of", and lane markings are often not bright enough for their absence to be instantly recognized before it's too late.
In this particular case it's hard to see too much about the bridge's geometry from the picture, but from what I can see one thing that would definitely have slowed the drivers' reaction times is that the guard rails appear to extend a good 10-15 feet further than the road itself, which would have created an illusion of continuity.
All of these reasons are why it's neither Google nor the drivers who are primarily at fault here—as others have noted, there should have been at a minimum warning signs but better yet a full roadblock preventing access to the bridge.