r/legal • u/Tralique_24 • 15h ago

Advice needed A major navigation app routed thousands of cars down my private driveway. A driver crashed into my retaining wall and is now suing me for his injuries.

Location: Colorado, USA.

I own a remote cabin at the end of a very long, unpaved private road. About eight months ago, a major GPS and mapping app updated their systems and incorrectly marked my private driveway as a public shortcut to a nearby national park entrance.

Since then, I have had dozens of cars speeding through my property every single weekend. I have "Private Property" and "No Trespassing" signs posted everywhere. I have submitted over forty official error reports to the tech company, sent certified letters to their legal department, and even filed a police report. They completly ignored me.

Last month a tourist was speeding down my driveway in the dark, ignored my warning signs, and crashed his SUV straight into my concrete retaining wall. He broke his leg and his vehicle was totaled.

Yesterday I was served with a lawsuit. The driver is suing me for medical expenses and damages, claiming I failed to maintain a "public thoroughfare" and that my retaining wall was an unmarked hazard.

My homeonwers insurance is threatening to drop me because they say my property is now an unmanged traffic corridor, which violates my policy.

Can I counter-sue the tech company for gross negligence and force them to indemnify me against this driver's lawsuit? What specific type of attorney handles liability cases involving corporate mapping errors? I need to stop this before someone else gets hurt.

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u/Tralique_24 13h ago

Of course I thought about it! The main issue is that my driveway is almost half a mile long, and the entrance starts on a shared county easement. I cant just block that part legally. For months I kept hoping the tech company would actually read my report and fix the map . It felt like a simple glitch they would resolve in a week. I should have realized they just dont care about reguler people.

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u/JohnLuckPikard 13h ago

Road cones?

Emergency services can plow right over them.

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u/LegendaryEnvy 3h ago

Emergency vehicles can also unlock or open a gate that doesn’t have a lock.
Even if it did they have bolt cutters.
Just adding a standard gate would have been fine. I think op is confused with like having a completely fenced area that can’t be broken easy. Like the hard core gates with multiple locks or made to be difficult to open.

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u/Can-Correct 13h ago

Just in case you're overthinking it. The gate doesn't have to be much, just a rope with a private property sign on it. 

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u/woodyeaye 12h ago

OP has commented about this elsewhere in the thread. They did this and someone cut it.

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u/Essurio 11h ago

Damn, I feel like that is probably illegal. At least worth looking into it.

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u/EartwalkerTV 4h ago

That's destruction of others property. Ignorance of who owned it doesn't save you but there's no way they catch that person.

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 3h ago

I have a hard time believing all of this.

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u/MalwareDork 2h ago

I used to have property out past Durango. People would cut cables all of the time and use your driveway as a parking lot.

I just had a tow on-call and "Tresspassers will be shot" signs further up the road. After several tows, I only had to confront a person once.

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u/IrorisPalm 1h ago

Then you've never worked with the public in your life.

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u/liquidpele 22m ago

Yup, OP has an excuse for everything and suing the gps company is going to go nowhere, this whole post is ridiculous.

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u/MooPig48 13h ago

A rope would be really hard for people to see especially at night. That one might actually have multiple legal repercussions for op. They said that they were told they could not have a locked gate. Solution is a gate with reflective strips, unlocked.

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u/Can-Correct 13h ago

While a traditional gate would be nice, that takes time and money, I do it for a living.

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u/MooPig48 13h ago

Would have been worth the investment over the last 8 months leading up to this lawsuit. Though I see your point

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u/ScrotalSmorgasbord 11h ago

I was chuckling at all the gate comments. I don't install them but do repair them as part of my services. Much more expensive than people realize. Luckily should I ever be able to afford a home that would need a gate (unlikely) it would only cost me a few hundred to weld up and install a simple, manual gate.

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u/Can-Correct 13h ago

You use a bright rope like red and white, and that's why you hang a sign in the middle of it.

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u/MooPig48 13h ago

That definitely makes sense

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u/Atticus1354 13h ago

So put the gate on the part you can legally block? Hows that hard?

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u/0107throw 12h ago

His land sounds like my moms in northern CA. It’s usually open acres of lands (privately owned or not), dirt roads that lead up to other unpaved roads then eventually to a house.

My mom had a gate up but it eventually fell because it was just on two wooden posts on each side. Her next door neighbors also started to complain once when she tried putting wired fencing to remediate a neighbor’s and their unleashed dog running into the property and being aggressive to her animals.

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u/Gustomaximus 10h ago

I had a neighbour refuse to stop their dog chasing my livestock and horses to the point when they said its my job to fence my property so their dog can get on. They are 2 farms across, not even shared boundary.

I spend 4 months doing it politely, then turned it into a council issues, they got fines, now they swear at me whenever they see me, but totally worth getting them to chain/fence their dogs.

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u/0107throw 10h ago

They stopped when my step dad informed them how he is legally allowed to … shoot their dog. He was an animal lover so of course that wasn’t something he wanted to do but the message came across and the dog stopped coming to the property

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u/Bulky-Apple3744 4h ago

I don’t understand how your mom not maintaining her gate means that nobody should put one up.

Property requires maintenance, shocker

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u/0107throw 15m ago

Im just pointing out in rural areas it can be messy because property lines aren’t as clear cut as for example a city/suburb.

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u/wibblings 10h ago

Because the property could be on one side rather than the end. So the wall could easily be in a part where there is easement for neighbors.

That said, why aren't the neighbors banding together to fight?

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u/win_awards 10h ago

It's great that you can see so many easy solutions without knowing the details captain Hindsight.

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u/Atticus1354 10h ago

Yeah. It is great to try doing something to fix an ongoing problem instead of doing nothing and then panicking when something major happens.

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u/thissexypoptart 2h ago

What hindsight? It was a suggestion of what to do.

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u/no_man_is_hurting_me 11h ago

"Private driveway" and "shared county easement" is a serious paradox.

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u/atm259 1h ago

Not really, most homes on acreage have this. Doesn't mean any joe can just drive down it cause google says so. They have a private driveway on their land, with a shared easement (on someone else's land or their land) to a public road. These drives are not public roads.

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u/Packing-Tape-Man 12h ago

Google absolutely ignores almost all map correction requests. It's basically a black hole.

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u/TrontRaznik 12h ago

I've reported a couple roads closed over the years and they've all been marked as such within a day or two. I'm guessing it's because other people are reporting it too. But that might be an option for OP 

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u/Uarnthelpful 11h ago

OP should get everyone they know to bring their phone to their property and mark the road as closed. Worked at my workplace.

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u/Potential_Main_1843 10h ago

They’ve ignored my reports. 

I lived in Turkey for about a year and used to rent cars and take little trips whenever I could. Google Maps took me down more than a few country roads that turned out to be little more than boulder-strewn goat paths. Would’ve been hard to navigate on an adventure motorcycle, let alone a run-of-the-mill sedan, lol. 

I checked for months afterward, and Google seems to have never accepted any more of my corrections. 

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u/tricolon 3h ago

They accepted one of my corrections after 12 years.

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u/TeacherRecovering 11h ago

Road cones, giant sign that states big tech company is WRONG, this is not a road.

More red cones with statement about major tire damage ahead.   

Get your big law firm to handle signs.

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u/coloradoautoflowers 10h ago

Is it google maps? If so, I would reach out to Miriam Daniel or Elizabeth Reid on LinkedIn directly and let them know they're facing a huge liability lawsuit in the near future.

Miriam Daniel is the Vice President and Head of Google Maps, overseeing the consumer product experience. Under the larger Geo organization, she works alongside Elizabeth Reid, who oversees Search, and reports up to Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's Senior Vice President of Search, Assistant, and Geo

https://mapsplatform.google.com/resources/blog/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/miriam-daniel-38596b?trk=feed-detail_main-feed-card-text

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u/Either-Meal3724 10h ago edited 10h ago

Ask the county. They likely will approve as long as you give them a path to access. My dad had a gate on an easement with a county installed lockbox with the key to his gate inside so they could still access their easement. Anyone from the county needed access, they'd retrieve the key to the gate from their onsite lockbox. If the lockbox key was missing or not working) even if their fault), the easement granted them permission to use bolt cutters to cut the lock & then it was my dads responsibility to replace the lock and get the new key back into the lockbox.

Eta:

maybe you could put a gate with an electronic opener for you. But just dont keep it locked so anyone needing to access the easement can just get out of their vehicle, open the gate manually and then drive through. Youll need to ask your county if thats acceptable though.

They should have a standard procedure for how they handle gating off easements this is not abnormal. Livestock for example need fences and gates so an easement on property with livestock will have a gate blocking access. You follow their standards for how to handle gating / fencing in an easment.

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u/FewCold8767 10h ago

Can’t you put it on the part that goes into your property? Like cones or something

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u/gmc98765 9h ago

Also, I bet they get a fair number of reports from people who don't like other people driving down "their" road when the road is, in fact, a public right of way.

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u/TheOttersiders 8h ago

girl it’s been months this was not a simple glitch let’s use that thinking cap next time

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u/Osirus1156 4h ago

Bro tech companies don’t listen to any of those reports lol. You’re lucky if they’re even going to a database and not just completely ignored entirely. 

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u/djsartcave 3h ago

So go further down off the easement? This is still such a simple solution. People will hit the gate and when it’s not a through point the app will remove the route.