Re: Process failure at Google
I can't speak for now, but about a decade ago I noticed that Google was navigating people down an off ramp, and telling them to perform a U turn into oncoming high speed traffic going the wrong way up a road.
In Google's defence it was a new road where an older one used to be, however they had all the new roundabouts and all, so it's like somebody just guessed at the way the road system worked and got it badly wrong.
Against Google, there didn't seem to be any mechanism (at the time) to flag this as dangerous and not to do it.
So I took the issue up on the support forum thing. Eventually a volunteer with map editing abilities stepped in to help. This involved going back to take photos to show what was actually there, plus the volunteer changing the road a section at a time and waiting for each change to be "approved" by some opaque process before doing the next part. It took weeks.
Other map issues? Oh boy. Many rural roads here in France have communal numbers (like C4, C5, etc) and just as many aren't named. So Google has ignored the C numbers and instead given them the name of the nearest farm or other named building. This has led to a messy situation where driving from one turn to the next used to result in "slight right to stay on Bellevue" (fifty metres later) "continue on to La Maison Neuve" (a hundred metres later) "continue on to Les Marches". Navigation has stopped doing that, I'm guessing too many people complained, but the roads are still marked that way.
Which means people looking to find me are usually directed to halfway up the lane as navigation, for some reason, prioritises the road in preference to the building.
Oh, and recently they seem to have rejigged the route algorithm so a quick 5km jaunt using back roads is less attractive than 10km on major routes, because it's clearly more efficient when you can drive faster, right? Sorry, but I'd prefer the shortest most direct route.
Okay, granted, it's not quite the same as being directed off of a bridge, but it does highlight that any sane person will take navigation directions with a huge pinch of salt. It's useful when you're alone and don't quite know where you're going, but personal judgement should always trump what a machine says...even if she sounds like a Norland Nanny.