Here’s the story:

A jury ordered St. Louis $3 MILLION to a woman who claims a municipal truck cut her off and led to a single vehicle crash.

She did not have any evidence about the vehicle, department, or employee other than the fact that “a municipal truck caused her to swerve and avoid a collision.”

The crash time and location were certainly determinable.

If St. Louis had GPS on its vehicles, it would be trivial to determine if (and/or who) was the truck in question.

You could run a landmark report for a 2 mile area around the crash location at the exact time (20 minutes between 14:50 and 15:10 near the landmark called “Mesa Riverview” in this example):

Check to see if any vehicles were near the accident at that time

We quickly see there was no activity:

No activity near the crash at that time

Then you can pull the entire day to see if ANY vehicles went nearby that landmark, and when:

Pull the full day's history into a map

Zooming in on our “pretend crash” landmark, we see that that there was NO ACTIVITY for that day, & the closest to that landmark was the “Scion” at 10:03 driving by on the freeway, and “Adam 4000″ at 12:20 several roads away from the incident.

Conclusive proof no city vehicle caused the accident

Now it’s entirely possible that the vehicle DID in fact cause the accident — however, right now it is the word of an unfortunate accident victim against the City — and apparently that word is worth $3,000,000.

That $3,000,000 would buy a city of 1,500 vehicles GPS Tracking for every vehicle for 5 years based on my calculations.

Plus they would have the benefits of GPS Tracking instead of just a way to avoid a jury verdict.  And maybe if the drivers knew they were being tracked, the accident wouldn’t have occurred in the first place if it was in fact caused by a city worker.

Rob.