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Cycling in London lucky escape.pngVideo: you'll never guess what happens after this cyclist tries to avoid the pedestrians
A cyclist's helmet camera has captured the moment a driver cuts across his path at a junction in Fulham, leaving him with a fractured wrist and bruising.
The video, titled Cycling Accident in London - Lucky Escape, shows some of the challenges of cycling in the UK: Myles Gatherer is riding toward a T-junction in a bike lane, before moving out to avoid two people crossing the road, while at the same time a driver, coming from the opposite direction, is turning right.
The driver proceeds into Gatherer's path, and the moment of impact and cries of pain are captured as he hits the car, rolls across the bonnet and onto the ground.
Myles Gatherer told the Evening Standard: "When approaching the green lights two pedestrians crossed in front of me.
"I took the decision to manoeuvre around the pedestrians, after I cleared the pedestrians I entered the junction.
"When I entered the junction it became clear that a vehicle located at the oncoming side of the road intended to move across my trajectory."
Gatherer was not seriously hurt, fortunately.
Some viewers have expressed the opinion the rider should have slowed down for the pedestrians.
YouTube commenter 95Gabe said: "If he had braked when he saw them...like a motorist would...he would have been going slow enough to avoid the collision. I am not absolving the motorist, but I suspect the cyclist was hidden behind the pedestrians which were crossing the road. Given that they were there the motorist probably thought it was safe to turn."
What do you think?
Laura Laker is a freelance journalist with more than a decade’s experience covering cycling, walking and wheeling (and other means of transport). Beginning her career with road.cc, Laura has also written for national and specialist titles of all stripes. One part of the popular Streets Ahead podcast, she sometimes appears as a talking head on TV and radio, and in real life at conferences and festivals. She is also the author of Potholes and Pavements: a Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network.
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84 comments
100% the drivers fault.
And I'd like to punch everyone in this thread in the face that says otherwise.
Car driver clearly at fault. Cyclist not at fault but needs lessons in self preservation. I get at least 2 of these a week that generate a healthy blast of four letter words rather than an A&E visit because I anticipate the crappy driving and prepare accordingly.
Car driver clearly at fault. Cyclist not at fault but needs lessons in self preservation. I get at least 2 of these a week that generate a healthy blast of four letter words rather than an A&E visit because I anticipate the crappy driving and prepare accordingly.
And the headline. Sort it out road.cc. You're better than this.
I use the Garmin Virb Elite because without the screen stats you get a misguided sense of the speeds involved. Here's the same type of incident with the extras:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/X4k-jJT9vQk
Note speeds, time, date, gradient, RPM, etc . . . no doubts for anyone viewing the footage after an incident. In my case doing 30kph in a 50 zone. Even the dumbest magistrate can see what happens without the predjudice of being a driver not familiar to what the world looks like from a bike.
Car driver NOT indicating either. Have they been arrested yet and charged with driving without due care and attention? Are they even insured or have a license? MOT and Tax? No surprise as it's a Vauxhall Corsa!
I don't understand why the cyclist didn't slow down. As soon as I saw the (stupid) pedestrians I'd have killed my speed, then the following accident would have been totally avoidable.
Quite clearly the drivers fault, the cyclist could not have been speeding as there is no such offence. He took action to avoid the mistake by the pedestrians. This is where Presumed Liability works in the rest of Europe as it ensures that those in vehicles that can cause the most harm, take reponsibility & are more cuatious with their actions. Too many people drive around these days in the little bubble of their cars completely oblivious of anything happening around them. I don't say this as a cyclist, I see when walking & cycling too. If the driver had been paying attention then they would not have made the manouvere. I was always taught to drive, that you look down the road and anticipate what could happen. In a lot of cases drivers no longer do that. So to say there was blame on the cyclist, is a load of rubbish. The pedestrians made a mistake, the cyclist ensured that they did not come to harm, the driver did not.
Having just looked at the video a bit closer, the driver indicated, the pedestrians did not obstruct the view of the cyclist, the driver starts the manouvere before the cyclist even enters the junction. Probably a case of thought they had plenty of time. Acid test would the driver have failed a driving test, carrying out the manouvere? Probably.
It's a subject close to my heart because I commute into central London every day.
It makes me wince but you can see it coming, why didn't he slow down?
You're always going to come off worse on a bike than in a car so discretion is the better part of valour.
Also having a video camera doesn't give you carte blanche to ride like a maniac.
I don't understand why people are saying that it's the cyclist's fault for going too quickly. Yes, he would have avoided that particular incident by going either quicker (before the car turned) or slower (after the car turned), but then if he'd gone a different route, he would have avoided it as well.
The Highway Code makes it quite clear: (http://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/using-the-road---road-junctions-170-to-183.html)
The car driver clearly did not wait for a safe gap and thus it is very clearly the driver's fault. The cyclist was following the rules of the road and mentioning the "motor vehicle speed limit" is irrelevant. Also, the pedestrians crossing the road are irrelevant as they were not involved in the car-turning-right incident.
Sorry but you have all missed the main point, if the cyclist had left home 30 seconds earlier or ridden a little bit faster he would have avoided all this
Sorry couldn't resist it
Sorry but you have all missed the main point, if the cyclist had left home 30 seconds earlier or ridden a little bit faster he would have avoided all this
Sorry couldn't resist it
Much of the time it's quite easy to see what's coming if, prior to seeing what's coming, you've just read an article that tells you what's coming.
More importantly who clicked on the YouTube links that showed lady who loses her skirt after this video finishes?
Driver pulled out, enough said.
The cyclist faced not one but two unpredictable hazards: a driver indicating right, and pedestrians who'd already started crossing, who may have unsighted the driver. Whilst the cyclist may have been strictly within his rights, his riding was imprudent. He should have slowed well in advance of the junction, anticipating the needs of other road users whose physical and perceptual capacities may be inferior to his own.
Also, to my mind, his positioning was too far to the left for his speed. It's harder to spot a cyclist against a busy background of pavement/lamp posts/shop fronts than on the crown of the road.
This crash was easily avoidable, had the cyclist but observed two cardinal rules of polite travel:
1) Do not accelerate into potential points of conflict.
and
2) Always give way to pedestrians.
Note: 2) here would have included slowing to a respectful speed: slow enough to make reassuring eye contact; perhaps even a smile, and bidding your fellow citizen good day, not swerving round them, inwardly cursing their existence.
At 00:15 the pedestrians are already in the road - they have priority
plus one.
A little harsh. The pedestrians made a misjudgement; that doesn't make them stupid.
I think a lot of people seem to be treating this all as a single incident, and I don't see it that way. First there's the issue with the people crossing the road: personally I think that the rider behaves at best discourteously and at worst threateningly towards them by (it seems) not slowing and by diverting course as little as possible. It doesn't result in a collision, but the second pedestrian clearly has to speed up to get out of his way, and there was rather more risk there than necessary. It's certainly not something I'd do.
The collision with the car is a quite separate matter. I don't think it's really valid to say "if he'd slowed, the collision would have been avoided"—perhaps so, but that's really just a case of luck of timing: if you want to hypothetically slow the cyclist, you can also hypothetically shift the driver's actions a little later in time as well. And whilst the cyclist's speed is arguably excessive for narrowly missing pedestrians, it's certainly not excessive for proceeding through the junction. Fundamentally, the driver has turned across the path of an oncoming vehicle, and—barring highly exceptional factors, which aren't present in this scenario—that's a pretty well-established case of unilateral fault.
Curses. I got dragged in.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing when we all sit and watch the video, for all we now is that the cyclist was concentrating on avoiding the pedestrians, rather than looking down the road. Probably having a "WTF were those idiots doing.." moment, as cyclists we moan about car drivers but we all do it, that momentary lapse of concetration and you miss something.
Te
The pedestrians crossed on red so did not have priority. That doesn't give a driver or a cyclist the right to run into them obviously.
And that's why they call it an accident baby
And that's why they call it an accident baby
(Duplicate post. Not sure what happened there.)
Irrelevant as the cyclist didn't "ride like a maniac". The driver _drove_ like an idiot, but that seems to get a pass because it so commonplace.
100% the drivers fault.
And I'd like to punch everyone in this thread in the face that says otherwise.
As a former driving instructor, I would say this was a clear case of driving without due care and attention, the driver should be prosecuted accordingly. Had the driver been looking to see if it was safe to proceed, they would not have pulled across into the path of the on coming traffic.
I'm hoping the headline is sarcasm, rather than a sign the site is descending to the seventh circle of click-bait hell.
(Sarcasm as in 'you will of course guess what will happen - a motorist will do something arrogant and careless')
...and the guy was going faster than I would have, but the driver still should have been looking more carefully before cutting across. Two scampering pedestrians don't render the cyclist invisible.
(Also, am I the only fool who repeatedly tried clicking the 'play' button on the still screen shot at the top of the page?)
"If he had braked when he saw them...like a motorist would"
Ignoring everything else, this statement irks me. I can only say, as a pedestrian, I don't see the basis for it. Sounds decidedly optimistic to me. Only yesteday I had to leap out of the way of a driver who could clearly see me but had no intention of slowing down when as far as she was concerned it was my job to get out of her way..
Motorists indeed will often _speed up_ for the pleasure of seeing you leap back out of their way so as to establish the correct pecking order. Generally they, unlike cyclists, know they can rely on a pedestrian's self-preservation instinct to cede priority to their vehicles.
Occasionally peds will even run or jump back into the path of a bike in a quite understandable preference to counting on the motorist slowing down.
For me, both at fault for differing things and to different degrees. Car should not have pulled across. Full stop. Question for me is why did the driver feel it safe to do so?
The rider having seen the car ahead should have assumed it 'may' pull across (and therefore possible).
From a cyclists point of view if that were me I'd be feeling partly responsible for my mishap.
Luckily though the cyclist ok so can ride again having hopefully learned a lesson.
The car driver however may not learn a lesson as they didnt get hurt. I may be wrong though.
An afterthought: if the cyclist was a car most people would be saying it was going into the junction too fast.......
Just for the record I am a cyclist and a car driver and feel all road users have responsibilty for others' safety (and ones own).
Okay but how does this crazy old trick help us get a flatter stomach?
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