Three years ago, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sent their first plea to tech giants including Apple, Google, and Microsoft to add railroad crossings to their mapping services as an added safety measure. The NTSB believes that by doing so, some rail accidents that result in casualties could be prevented, especially due to people’s increasing reliance on navigation apps to get around. Unfortunately, this recommendation went largely ignored.
Now, the NTSB has released a report criticizing these tech giants for their failure to update their apps, insisting that more information available to drivers is always better. The report reads as follows: “the inaction by giant tech companies remains a frustration for safety advocates, at a time when 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.” The Federal Railroad Administration agreed with these criticisms, adding that the tech companies’ inaction is “tantamount to gross negligence.”
The crash that originally sparked the NTSB’s call for action occurred on Feb. 24, 2015 in California when an Amtrak train hit a truck and derailed, killing the engineer and injuring 32 passengers on board. After an investigation, the NTSB found that the truck driver had accidentally turned onto the railroad’s right-of-way due to fatigue and unfamiliarity with the area. As a result of these findings, the NTSB issued their original safety recommendation to add railroad crossings to the maps of the big tech companies and other GPS providers like TomTom, INRIX, Garmin, MapQuest, and UPS.
NTSB officials believe that if the trucker had seen the railroad crossing marked on his navigation app, he may have not turned onto the railroad’s right-of-way and the accident could have been avoided. In the 2015 safety recommendation, the agency recommended that the companies “incorporate grade crossing-related geographic data, such as those currently being prepared by the Federal Railroad Administration, into [their] navigation applications to provide road users with additional safety cues and to reduce the likelihood of crashes at or near public or private rail crossings.”
While the benefits of including railroad crossings on navigation apps remain unknown, rail safety advocates welcome the idea as a potential crash-preventing measure. Of course, railroad companies themselves also have an obligation to continuously seek new measures to maximize rail safety. In the meantime, however, it remains unclear whether tech companies will take the NTSB’s recommendation seriously.
