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news
Near Miss of the Day 784: Another close pass driver refuses awareness course... only to get £1,152 fine and four points in court
If you've been caught on camera in the wrong, it's probably best to cut your losses, take your medicine and accept your place on a driver awareness course...
Today's Near Miss of the Day has shades of Sunday's now-famous edition — Near Miss of the Day 783 where an aggressive close pass driver was offered a speed awareness course, declined, and ended up with a £2,460 fine and six points after losing two appeals.
No effing and blinding in today's, and a slightly lesser punishment in court, but another motorist who should probably have just taken their £85 slap on the wrist and run.
road.cc reader Dave was riding near Bridgend in Wales last September when he was close passed by the driver of the Audi Q8 in the video above.
As with Sunday's Near Miss, Dave sent this one in via Operation SNAP, prompting the police to offer the driver a place on an awareness course. Instead, they turned it down, taking it to court and ended up with a rather hefty bill.
A fine of £1,152, surcharge of £115, £620 court costs, and 4 points on his licence. That awareness course is looking quite appealing now, isn't it?
"From all of my correspondence with South Wales Police they have been great with dealing with close pass videos," Dave told us. "They have provided good feedback on most the videos and are quick to respond if they need more information."
> Near Miss of the Day turns 100 - Why do we do the feature and what have we learnt from it?
Over the years road.cc has reported on literally hundreds of close passes and near misses involving badly driven vehicles from every corner of the country – so many, in fact, that we’ve decided to turn the phenomenon into a regular feature on the site. One day hopefully we will run out of close passes and near misses to report on, but until that happy day arrives, Near Miss of the Day will keep rolling on.
If you’ve caught on camera a close encounter of the uncomfortable kind with another road user that you’d like to share with the wider cycling community please send it to us at info [at] road.cc or send us a message via the road.cc Facebook page.
If the video is on YouTube, please send us a link, if not we can add any footage you supply to our YouTube channel as an unlisted video (so it won't show up on searches).
Please also let us know whether you contacted the police and if so what their reaction was, as well as the reaction of the vehicle operator if it was a bus, lorry or van with company markings etc.
> What to do if you capture a near miss or close pass (or worse) on camera while cycling
Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.
Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.
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66 comments
I know this 80 year old who reads The Sun, 'Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster', 'Liverpool fans urinating on paramedics' etc. etc so you can guess how outraged he is. He, like the silly old pillock who we hope will appeal, can't tell the difference between distance from the kerb and distance from the cyclist- he presumably shares this disability with most Mail and Sun readers
One rather concerning element of this case is that the unrepentant driver (Mr Humphreys) is the director of a Warehousing and Haulage firm. I really hope that his lorry drivers show more care and consideration when driving the wagons than he does when driving his Audi. I wonder if he still drives the lorries himself. Hopefully at 77 years old his involvement with the company is more boardroom than steering wheel.
I'd just noticed that, after reading the Loophole spin-off of this article. Very simple search at Companies House. He's a director of a warehousing company and of a 'freight transport by road' company. I don't imagine 4 points on his licence would help, either...
And a Scottish Police advisory video says, "We'd expect you to go all the way over the centre line markings"
Advice that the police themselves clearly don't believe is worthless. Action is the only way to demonstrate belief, and we have heard on here many times that Police Scotland have arranged such a cumbersome system for reporting close-passing (or anything else, presumably) that nobody can face it. Lancashire Constabulary certainly doesn't believe any of this namby-pamby 1.5m nonsense- although the sniggering b*****d officers occasionally put out 'Pass Safely' and '1.5m' signs just for a laugh and so they can enjoy ignoring perfectly documented incidents like this, perpetrated by BMW 5665 MH.
This chump is on Jeremy Vine's Channel 5 show right now, still seems bewildered that he was prosecuted at all. As a bonus, he also managed to get "I'm a cyclist too" thrown in as well.
Why does Jeremy give this guy a platform to spout his rubbish ? oh yeah ratings, unless the guys pov is completely shown up for the self entitled bobs that it is, then I really dont see this helping anyone on the road.
My eyes hurt from fast forwarding the first 60 minutes of the show at 30x but it was worth it for Jeremy's eye roll when he asked "why not give him a bit more room" and dangerous 'driver' replied "I could have done I suppose".
The other idiot presenter said "well he didn't hit him". My mistake, that's ok then.
Given the driver's clear lack of awareness of the law (and ongoing inability to accept that he was breaking it), should it not be the case that if you turn down an awareness course and are then found guilty in court that you should have to take the court's sanction and attend the awareness course as well?
I think this - and Ian's final sentence about him being "aggrieved and unrepentant" are really key points. He clearly hasn't learnt a thing from his experience and still thinks his driving is fine. If he continues to claim there was nothing wrong with his driving, then he should be banned from driving because he clearly is unsafe.
As well as being made to sit the awareness course they should also be made to sit on a stationary bike while someone drives a wankpanzer Q8 past them at the same speed/passing distance that they thought was appropriate to leave the cyclist.
The BBC have belatedly reported on this too. To be honest, the driver just makes himself sound like an idiot.
The bit that baffles me is how he thought risking £2500 of solicitors fees made any sort of sense for fighting an £85 awareness course with no points in his licence through his own choices made any sense.
I suspect he was aggrieved from the start and sulkily ignored the police letters having some misplaced sense of entitlement and only got legal advice when the court summons arrived. I then suspect the solicitor gave him the options and he rejected the option offered to plead guilty instead of going to court.
Absolutely a case of more money than sense.
What's worse is the end result is he is unrepentant and aggrieved and on the road with his sense of injustice and no retraining.
That's my exact thoughts..... "I don't want to pay the £85 awareness course so I will spend 30 times that amoun on solicitors to try and avoid it"
Personally I hope he does appeal it again, and the judge slaps him with an even bigger fine for being an idiot.
If he can afford to drive a £65k + car I'm sure a £5k fine would be well within his means to afford.
I'm not suprised to see this reported in rags like the Daily Fail, but the BBC's article is below the standard I would expect from them, simply repeating the driver's whining verbatim.
On the matter of the fine, I note that 4 points is "Band A" for this offence and therefore the fine is presumably Band A too - i.e. 25 – 75% of relevant weekly income. So the fine itself it less than he earns in a week. https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/magistrates-court/item/car...
Motivation? Probably just the same facet of human nature which makes drivers "have to" pass you unsafely because they're in a hurry, then immediately stop to have it out with you for as long as you like if you wave your arm / shout at them.
Empowered by a motor vehicle and facilitiated by a large subset of (UK) culture - but a feature of humans. Hence my skepticism at how far we can get with "train 'em better" or even "remove all the bad ones from the road". Although we should do more of that.
Also a story in the DM on this. Unsurprisingly headline fully extends outrage on behalf of the convicted law breaking driver (couldn't bring myself to read the article). A quick flick through the comments is equally unsurprisingly depressing though.
DM readers normally insisting on greater law and order obviously don't understand irony.
If this was going to be a consistent result every time someone appealed their FPN then long may it continue.
Article about this in the Sun, from the driver's point of view (of course!)
https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/18894514/fined-points-passing-cyclist-cl...
I was fined £1.8k and given 4 points on my licence for ‘passing a cyclist too closely’ but I left LOADS of room
Um, so even by their own account they only left ~80% of the minimum they're supposed to? Not sure they're really helping their case there...
I think Mr. Humphreys needs to watch the video. No way is there four feet left.
Here's the location, as far as I can tell.
https://goo.gl/maps/o5fcbGMfMMkWH5zu5
The roadway appears to be 18.5 feet (5.6 m) wide there, so 9.25 feet (2.8 m) for the lane. Scaling the line drawing I found of a Q8, allowing for his offside tyres being barely over the centreline, there is 5.83 ft (1.78 m) of Audi still in the cyclist's lane, leaving 3.42 ft (1.02 m) for the cyclist. I imagine the cyclist himself uses up quite a bit of that, so yes it is every bit as close as it appears.
I read it as (maybe?) he thought he needed to leave four feet from the kerb, and that therefore four feet wasnt so bad? And I agree, no way did he leave anything like even four feet between the cyclist and his SUV.
Of course he didn't and I think you're right, I've had several "debates" with drivers recently who believe that 1.5m means 1.5m from the kerb, so with me being 50 cms wide and riding 50 cms off the kerb it's OK for them to pass within 50 cms of my outside shoulder.
Even more basic than that, judging from some Newspaper online discussions of close passing, it appears most drivers have no idea what 1.5m is and think it's 15cm.
Pointing out that 1.5m should be the minimum distance between the outermost part of the cyclist and innermost part of the car provokes a response that it is 1.5m when it clearly is nowhere near
It doesn't bode well for when Johnson pulls the plug on the metric system...
If only he'd accepted the awareness course, then he'd now know.
Loving the "I never done nuffin' in my life! It was ages since I broke the law and that was only by a tiny amount!"
The poor dear really ought to have just sucked it up and accepted the driving awareness course, IMO...
I've never had a fine does not equate to being evidence of being a careful and considerate driver. My fines record (3 speeding tickets over 45 years, 9 points in total) certainly does not reflect the appalling standard of my driving at certain times, simply the probability of being caught.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-61815609
The bloke's a complete fool. Highway code says at least 1.5m (and more if you're doing over 30mph). He's measured the gap at 1.2m. Whether or not to appeal 🤔, just can't figure it out!
1.2m from the edge of the road maybe. The pillock is obviously still completely oblivious to his poor driving. I'd suggest he now loses his licence until he attends the awareness course.
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