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news
Common Lane, Burn, Selby (Google Street View)Cyclist suffers broken arm after car passenger shoved him off bike in latest shocking unprovoked attack from moving vehicle
Police in North Yorkshire have appealed for witnesses after a cyclist suffered a broken arm when he was pushed off his bike by the passenger of a moving car, in what is fast becoming a worryingly habitual occurrence on the UK’s roads.
The shocking incident took place at around 8.40pm on Wednesday 2 October on Common Lane, in the Burn area of Selby, North Yorkshire.
According to North Yorkshire Police, one of the occupants of a passing car leaned out of their window to push a cyclist, a man in his 50s, off his bike. The victim required hospital treatment after suffering fractures to his arm.
The police said they are particularly appealing for information about the vehicle involved in the seemingly unprovoked attack, which is described as a medium-sized hatchback car.
“We urge the driver of this vehicle to come forward to the police and provide any information which may assist our investigation,” North Yorkshire Police said in a statement.
“Please email freya.smith [at] northyorkshire.police.uk if you have any information that could help our investigation.
“Alternatively, you can call North Yorkshire Police on 101, select option 2 and ask for PC1637 Smith, or contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or via their website. Please quote reference 12240181526 when passing on information.”
> Police appeal over "serious assault" that saw cyclist pushed from bike by car passenger
As noted above, incidents involving the passengers of vehicles shoving cyclists off their bikes, causing potentially serious injuries, and in completely unprovoked attacks, are becoming an increasingly common trend on Britain’s roads.
In April, Kent Police launched an appeal and released a photo of a man (above) they wished to track down in relation to a “serious assault on a cyclist” the previous summer, which saw a woman pushed from her bike by a laughing car passenger.
Katie Good, a female Ironman athlete and immigration lawyer, had been out training with her boyfriend and fellow triathlete Olivier van den Bent-Kelly at the time of the incident, which saw her suffer a broken collarbone.
He later took to social media, stating that one of the people in the vehicle “leant out the window, and pushed her off her bike, before laughing and jeering at her as they drove away”, the incident coming after a motorist had “deliberately drove behind her”.
"To be involved in what is effectively a hit-and-run incident or assault, and for the culprits to act in such a premeditated, malicious manner is abhorrent," Van den Bent-Kelly said in a post at the time.
“I’m furious, upset, and appalled at what happened to her. Cyclists are already vulnerable road users who are frequently unfairly treated by vehicles. To be deliberately targeted in such a way really makes me ask the question: how could aiming for a young, female cyclist in this manner ever be acceptable to anyone?
“The lack of empathy, thought or awareness shown towards Katie and her life really highlights that more drivers need educating on how dangerous their vehicles are.”
Then, in July this year, a cyclist suffered serious facial injuries and a concussion after they were pushed from their bike by yet another car passenger near Reading.
A bike shop owner who was the first person to help the stricken cyclist described the scene as “horrendous”, after the 29-year-old victim was discharged from hospital, having received treatment for serious facial injuries including a fractured jaw, broken teeth, lacerations, and a concussion.
In June, Surrey Police arrested a 15-year-old after a violent attack on a cyclist near Box Hill left the victim seriously injured with a punctured lung, when masked thugs on a motorbike kicked him off on a popular cycle path.
The rider suffered broken bones and a punctured lung in the attack and told road.cc he had little memory of it except being "suddenly and violently pushed down onto the ground".
A month earlier, in May, a similarly concerning incident was reported at the other end of the country, when a Northumberland-based cyclist riding a time trial bike on the A1068 was shoved from his bike by the passenger of a BMW.
Carl Donaldson was training for the 47-mile Tyneside Vagabonds CC Mountain Time Trial, but suffered a broken shoulder blade and was critical of Northumbria Police's response, accusing the force of a "distinct lack of effort".
And last month, Nottinghamshire Police released footage captured by a cyclist’s rear bike camera earlier in the year, which showed a man hanging out of the passenger window of a silver van with his arms outstretched, before pushing the cyclist off the road.
The cyclist suffered facial injuries, bruising to his arms and legs, and a swollen knee in the incident, which was described by police as a “despicable random attack”.
In January 2023, a man was also fined £200 by Kilmarnock Sheriff Court for leaning out of an overtaking vehicle and hitting a cyclist with a tub of hair gel, after becoming frustrated that the cyclists were not "moving fast enough".
That September, a cyclist in Yorkshire feared that he could have been killed when a passenger in an overtaking car opened one of the vehicle's rear doors, hitting him on the hand.
Fortunately, Trev Walker escaped relatively physically unscathed, suffering swelling and bruising to his right hand, but said it "could easily have ended with serious injury or fatality", after a passenger sat in the rear of a passing car opened the door into him as the vehicle's driver passed on the B6248 near Wakefield.
And in April 2021, another cyclist, this time from Ireland, said that the occupants of a vehicle "could have killed me" after he was pushed off his bike by one of its passengers – who later posted footage of the shocking incident, which happened on a mountain road near Dublin, afterwards to social media.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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18 comments
The ones video'd above - have they been caught and prosecuted? Surely they have the cars numberplate? And that photo of the Kent chav is shockingly clear - how are they not behind bars within days of this happening?
Do they need to charge drivers with a new offence if they refuse to co-operate? Car crushed and life ban minimum?
I find it strange that the police don't go after the drivers for assualt as well - as they are obviously a willing participant and are deliberatelty driving close enough and slow enough to the cyclist to allow the passenger to push them off.
Surely the law of joint enterprise should apply here.
Yet more evidence of the disturbing trend to "other" cyclists. It's acceptable to attack, injure and even kill members of out groups, because they aren't really human, and history is littered with examples. The msm is guilty of this, with very rare exceptions, treating cyclists with contempt, and denigrating them frequently, or at the very least, not treating them as valid road users.
Quite what the answer is, I don't know, but some of the recent adverts showing cyclists as sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles probably helps.
This surely needs to feed into the new "Road Safety Strategy".
In terms of prosecution, this surelyis amenable to video evidence, then prosecution of the assisting driver under Joint Enterprise.
In terms of culture, we need to look at media, but also the likes of Iain Duncan-Smith and his poisonous lies in his list of "killer cyclists" recited under the protection of Parliamentary Privilege.
Similarly for Lord Hogan-Howe and his cronies in the Lords, cf "cyclists are like a plague of mosquitos".
We have been here before, in 200x with poisonous Matthew Parris and his lauding of wire strung across cycle paths, at a time when it was a routine offence.
Well done to Roadcc for keeping reporting this issue.
It would be a shame if these people ended up in their car upside down in a ditch, ideally in a flooding stream.
CHIRP - An example
In June 2022, Road.cc reported on two incidents where two cyclists were robbed with threat of violence in Orpington, NW Kent, by two suspects. I believe it may have been the same two people who had the idea of robbing me, a few weeks earlier when I was cycling through Orpington.
If had video evidence of these two people, and been able to upload this to CHIRP, then BC and CUK could have provided this to the Police, which may have helped with the ID of the two suspects in the other two robberies.
Yeah, but "opinion pieces" in the meeja that demonise cyclists are just harmless fun...
In March 2022, I emailed British Cycling and Cycling UK (Duncan Dollimore) requesting they develop a website that allows cyclists to report such incidents. The reality they and the Police are only aware of a small proportion of the 'attacks' on cyclists that actually occur. I suggested the portal could be called the Cyclist's Hazardous Incident Reporting Portal (CHIRP).
Intelligence gathered from this database could assist the Police in identifying suspects, discovering 'hotspots' and help with assigning Police resources to affected locations.
Sadly, this got nowhere.
As they say when someone says "why don't you do this thing I though of?" - on you go!
I think it's possibly a good idea. (EDIT - I certainly think our transport system would be much improved if road transport wasn't such an outlier and we did do things like collecting such data and feeding it back in to improve the system. Obviously now we treat incidents more as one-offs for the legal system. There is some reporting but it's skewed by coming from a police context / missing some potentially very useful info. Compare to the railways (RAIB), aviation (AAIB) and boats (MAIB) where e.g. there are statutory "elf and safety" bodies. The road equivalent was mooted - before "plan for drivers" - but never got anywhere).
Likely a lot of work (money, eventually). Anyone could set up "a list on the internet somewhere" which nobody knows about / goes out of date once the intitiator gets busy doing something else.
There are examples of such efforts which have run for a while - thinking of the sadly now dormant Beyond the Kerb casebook.
You could set this up yourself then try to get an organisation to take it on / keep lobbying them / try running for a position with the organisation and then convincing them from the inside?
Don't know about British Cycling so much but I don't think the charity Cycling UK is overfunded. And of course not all of their members are interested in the campaigning side.
Good luck...
Not everyone capable of having a good idea is also able to carry out that good idea. Fortunately we live in a society for that reason, so every idea held in good faith should be heard.
First what was proposed: I'm not sure the example given is a particularly useful. If there was video of someone being robbed (or even threatened) this should go direct to the police, whose job it is to do this kind of crime manangement. Why does logging it somewhere else help? Is the idea that someone should hold onto this just in case the police throw it away? But if the police do have something in the future they can bring the perpetrators to court for how does the external organisation get to find out and how is the e.g. video they held matched to the new information the police have? That is significant work - if nothing else requires maintaining an excellent ongoing relationship with the police who I don't think are free and easy with their information!
On your response: I was just noting that having an idea and emailing it to someone else (proposing that they should do the work and bear the cost of making it happen) will very likely lead to disappointment. It may be that the OP was just summarising lots of work they did e.g. research, lobbying, locating potential funding sources / supporters within other organisations etc. but that is what they wrote.
Philosophically "so every idea held in good faith should be heard" is probably nonsense. Much of the work of human minds (never mind society) appears to be sensibly erecting suitable hurdles to ensure the flood of available ideas competing for our time and attention is winnowed down - otherwise paralysis would set in. For better or worse ideas have to catalyse their own success (if only by "being popular") - and someone / a group generally still has to put in lots of work to get it to the point it can.
I'd put it slightly differently - "every idea held in good faith should be heard" may be fair enough, but that doesn't imply "every idea held in good faith should be acted upon", particularly by someone who the originator has arbitrarily decided should be responsible for it.
I'm still not sure why holding an idea in good faith should correlate with "should be heard" - bit like Wilde's "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling..." And it seems being "heard" is usually not enough even for the bearer of the idea - people want a certain level of "something" to happen. Dismissal for the sketchiest of reasons must be the fate of most ideas if only for lack of time / resources. The world is finite and human attention far more so.
Well, yes, but they have to be heard in order to be dismissed.
Au contraire - we have some excellent (if drastic) heuristics for wasting even less time. "An editorial in {insert hate rag of choice} called for ..." and I've stopped paying attention. (But I probably conduct myself so I rarely ever come across those...)
Of course this kind of "damned by association" or frankly prejudice is not "sound" but I'm not sure anyone can honestly say they're free from it?
I'd agree to that as an ideal, but practically, the experts don't have the time to properly explain why so many enthusiasts' ideas are worthless. e.g. Famous scientists may become flooded with lots of "crackpot" ideas with many of them not even reaching the bar of being falsifiable or making any testable hypothesis (unfortunately, that also includes String Theory) - they just don't have the time or inclination to get into possible arguments with every submitter to explain the often basic mistakes that are made by them.
However, there are times when "crackpot" ideas have later been shown to be both correct and useful: continental drift, heliocentrism, antiseptics etc.
The problem is that most people tend to be wrong most of the time which is why the scientific method was developed in an attempt to stop charismatic people pushing their wrong ideas onto us.
I'd forgotten - there's Upride.
Have you looked into starting a thread on the CUK forum? There is already one for unduly lenient sentences. I think it's possible to upload videos but I'm not sure.