In late 2016, federal investigators probing a fatal crash between a confused truck driver and a California commuter train made a plea to Google, Apple and Microsoft: Add information on the nation’s hundreds of thousands of railroad crossings to your navigation apps.

Nearly three years later, none of them has.

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. And it comes in an era when the tech industry is under fire in Washington for a litany of perceived anti-social behavior — from ruthless squelching of competitors to cavalier handling of users’ private data.
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