While it doesn’t seem like the opinion is something the community would be proud of… I could only find one list of people who had an accident while mapping OSM (especially collecting GPS tracks), and no list of accidents caused by the use of OSM was found
(Especially those that end up in roadside gutters because they trust OSM data and rely on them for navigation)
The first rule of travelling, whether it’s walking or driving, is use your eyes and commonsense.
A map or a satnav is only a suggestion, if things don’t look right then don’t continue. I am sure we have all found problems in OSM data and have found an alternative, fixing it later, but blindly following a satnav is driving without due care and attention.
We read of this happening but news reports never name the satnav.
In that case it appears that the satnav (whether OSM or others) will have taken them to the nearest point on the road network and they didn’t stop when it told them they had reached their destination.
Yes, it happens all the time … Uuups, schon wieder ein Malheur... LKW / NAVI … but usually you wouldn’t find out which satnav caused the problem. We do assume of course that such things do not happen with navigation gear using OSM data …
Another issue is people using difficult mountain hiking trails or tracks leading through tidal flats without the necessary experience and care and getting into real trouble by doing so. There are a couple of topics dealing with such issues but again
… and if you lack the experience to assess the danger of such a trail: don’t try to make it.
In other words: such accidents are not “caused by OSM” but by the stupidity or ignorance of the user.
There are people who have died while following OSM-based mapping apps. I’ve seen various reports go by over the years; it just took me about one minute of googling to find one of them (I won’t link to it here, it’s incredibly sad reading).
I understand your point but I think that’s absolving our responsibility as map-makers. People are under-educated about how to use maps, whether we like it or not. Employees of Silicon Valley Map Company That Has Pivoted To Auto™ will just do the simplest thing that renders vaguely convincingly and means they get paid and can go home and see their kids tonight, never mind the finer nuances of OSM tagging.
We could do a lot more to help people use OSM-based maps and to help minimise the chances of accidents like this. I don’t think it’s satisfactory to simply call someone who died following an OSM-based map “stupid” and “ignorant”. They were imperfect human beings like you and like me. We should be doing what we can to make this kind of death as unlikely as possible.
(…and this is why those who stomped on highway=scramble should take a good hard look at their consciences)
I do fully agree that we as contributors to various maps rendered from our data have the responsibility to map things with great care and make sure hazardous ways and places are identified and properly tagged. We cannot do more than that and we cannot take over resposibility for people who don’t care about what they are doing.
If I walk a difficult trail in flipflops, stumble and bread my leg I cannot blame the flipflop for being responsible. If I start a bushwalk on a hardly visible trail without any bushwalking experience and get lost in the wilderness, I cant blame the map nor the authority being in charge for the wilderness. Trying to do so just means trying to get rid of ones personal responsibility.
There is an old saying most people never have heard nowadays: “If the donkey feels too comfortable it will go skating on the ice.” Means you can’t blame the ice when you break into and drown.
To answer the original question: no, there isn’t a comprehensive list of accidents caused by OSM (other than the mapper-volunteered list you found). Depending on the situation, it can be very difficult to attribute an incident to a navigation application. While a list of such incidents might inform our mapping practices, helping us develop more robust tooling and procedures, we’d need to tamp down any unhelpful speculation and avoid “shooting ourselves in the foot” with legal liability.
We can learn lessons from accidents whether or not OSM is at fault. I can’t definitively prove that Amazon retagged a golf cart tunnel because one of their delivery vans got stuck in it because one of our golf mappers used an unfortunate preset, but we fixed the preset and mitigated the issue regardless. Hopefully this lawsuit blaming Google Maps for a fatality underscored for us the importance of taking notes seriously instead of hastily closing them to score cheap points on a leaderboard. Alas, this thread has repeated many of the same discussion points as that thread, so maybe not.
No one ever implicated OSM in this fatal crash involving a freight train, but the authorities nevertheless demanded that OSM and our data consumers take positive steps to warn motorists about railroad crossings, because they recognize the potential safety benefit from location technology. OSMUS was able to inform regulators about the steps that this community had already taken, on our own volition, because we care about the craft of mapmaking. It’s one example of us leading the map industry rather than playing catchup. On the other hand, if we had lectured the regulators and legislators about user responsibility or dragged our heels like some other map vendors have, I don’t think our case would’ve had such a favorable outcome.