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![Video: [Updated] Police appeal for attacked rider to come forward after London confrontation turns violent](https://cdn.road.cc/sites/default/files/styles/main_width/public/images/News/Farringdon%20altercation%201.jpg "Farringdon altercation 1")
Farringdon altercation 1Video: [Updated] Police appeal for attacked rider to come forward after London confrontation turns violent
We’ve all been tempted to give an earful to a driver who does something stupid, but as this helmet cam video shows, drivers who don’t care about the road rules sometimes carry passengers who have short tempers and poor impulse control.
[Update January 27] Police have appealed for the rider involved to come forward so that they can investigate the incident in which the rider remonstrates with a driver and is subsequently punched and knocked to the ground. According to the Evening Standard, a police spokesman said they were keen to speak to the cycle rage victim should he want to report the incident which happened at around 9.15am on Thursday in Farringdon Road, London.
In the comments on the video, the helmet cam rider George 'Jude' Hill says: “I have reported this to the police, I am trying to find the cyclist as I tried to tell him I had it on video, but he looked pretty dazed. Need him to report the incident in order to get prosecutions. Could you all share this as widely as possible to try and find him?”
In the video you see a white Audi stopped just outside the advanced stop box of a junction in Farringdon. George stops just behind the box, next to the car, and two other cyclists ride past him into the box.
The driver of the Audi then drives into the box. A rider in a black beanie pulls back from the stop line and shouts at the driver that this is a cycle area. When the lights change, the driver accelerates quickly away.
The rider in the beanie comes past George Hill and follows the white Audi. He is seen shouting at the driver at the next lights, calling him a “F*cking prick” and saying something that sounds like: “You ran over my f*cking foot mate.” (It's unclear from the video whether that is what happened.)
Hill rides past the altercation and by the time he turns round a man in a white shirt is standing next to the car, in front of the angry cyclist. You see him apparently attempt to punch the rider and then shove him, pushing him off his bike.
There’s more angry shouting as the rider picks himself up and gets back on his bike. The man in the white shirt then gets into the back of the Audi.
George attempts to get the rider’s attention but he rides away, back in the direction he’d come from.
As George implies, without a complaint from the rider who was hit the police are very unlikely to take action, despite the video.
In May last year the Mayor of London's cycling commissioner Andrew Gilligan pledged to start enforcing advanced stop lines, using CCTV cameras to catch infringers. He reiterated the point in August and during last year's Operation Safeway road safety crackdown, over 1,000 fixed penalty notices were issued to drivers for contravening traffic signals.
But we’ll leave the last word to YouTube commenter Jon: “Be safe out there, cyclists! Remember that you're dealing with angry idiots in 2 ton metal death machines.”
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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98 comments
Bystander effect
So it's true, w@nkers do drive Audi's.....
The w@nker in this case wasn't the driver!
Hope they find the "hardman" who lashed out and press charges!
Good quality camera though - anybody know what it is?
Really? You think that someone that deliberately pulls into an ASL (note this isn't the old "well we can't tell whether they though they were going to clear the ASL and then suddenly had to stop" ploy... this is clearly pulling into the ASL in order to be able to accelerate to the next traffic jam) is not behaving aggressively and dangerously?
You don't think that pulling in tightly in front of a group of cyclists, is aggressive and dangerous?
Using your car as a weapon/threat isn't different from using your fists... except for the fact that you stand a higher chance of killing or injuring someone.
More generally, not directed at your comment:
I'm amazed that our attention is so easily focussed on the lesser actions of the crim in the passenger role and away from the much more serious actions of the criminal driver.
I'd guess that the driver and passenger should both be facing charges for this. I'm holding my breath until they do
Re all the attention focused on the cyclist, yes it wasn't wise or dignified or productive, but he didn't actually commit a crime. The way some people post here you'd think he'd roasted the motorists and plucked their still beating hearts from the blackened carcasses.
Really ? did you not hear what he shouted at the car driver in a public place, foul and offensive language is a crime my good man see section 5 of the Public Order Act
Oh My! Bad language!
Obviously I was mistaken. There ARE two sides. There's a balance in this.
Apparently you're able to use foul language towards coppers. I'd imagine (speaking from my elevated judicial expert armchair -- and I want you to imagine me steepling and pursing my lips here) that you can also get away with it towards members of the public.
All that said, is that all you can focus on?
I have two Audis. I have 7 bikes. I can't do the maths on this.
What is the point of any of this!?
Yes - the driver was a bit silly. He obviously felt that the bikes were going to hold him up so moved forward to "get past". Of course its short sighted since its only a race to the next red light. But the correct response by the cyclist should be to let him go. Is giving somebody a ticking off about a driving misdemeanor ever going to achieve anything beyond antagonism? If he was prepared to shout at the driver then he should be prepared to have a proper fisticuffs in the street.
The real villan in the story is the wretched advanced stop box! What are these for - they pop the bikes in front of cars which is bound to wind the drivers up. Nearly as much of a distraction as the high-viz arguments.
The cycle campaigns are allowing themselves to be distracted by a cheap "fix" that seems to cause as many problems as it fixes!
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