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news
Near Miss of the Day 793: No action for driver overtaking into oncoming traffic (+ interesting Operation SNAP feedback)
Operation SNAP has been the police service which received submissions of a few of our more high-profile recent Near Miss of the Day videos, including NMotD 783 and 784 which both saw drivers reject awareness courses, only to end up being fined £2,460 and £1,152 at court respectively.
Today's however, is a 'no further action' case, with some interesting feedback to the cyclist involved.
The road.cc reader wasn't as concerned with the passing distance in the video above, but more "the complete abandonment of any caution by the driver".
"The oncoming car had to slow right down to avoid a collision, and had they been closer or going faster, the the overtaking car would be quite likely to hit me whilst taking avoiding action.
"Even worse a crash between them would've seen me getting collected by the wreckage. Many driver go around this bend way over the 30mph speed limit."
Having submitted the footage to Operation SNAP, here's the reply:
Thank you for your submission. For us to be able to make a decision correctly we need to be able to view the footage which identifies a clear and obvious offence.
On the front piece of footage we are unable to gauge how close the vehicle is to you as you have turned your head towards it at the point of the alleged offence occurring.
Please be advised that this makes it incredibly difficult for us to make an informed decision as it changes the angle of the footage, which in turn, makes it difficult for us to correctly judge the passing distance.
From viewing the rear footage it is clear that the driver of the subject vehicle is almost completely on the opposite of the carriageway when passing you. No further action.
> 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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44 comments
Absolutely.
I did a couple of rough calculations, assuming a small saloon car and an urban situation with a 30 mph speed limit.
Cyclist speed vs Overtaking time = time at risk
10mph - 1.2secs (highway code limit)
20mph - 4.0secs
25mph - 4.7secs (possible for a good cyclist)
29mph - 24secs (improbable)
The overtaking driver has to make a judgement based on the relative speeds of the two vehicles before he starts the manoeuvre.
Time at risk increases with the length of the vehicle, but we all know that.
The Highway code stopping distance at 30mph is 23metres (lots of questions about these numbers) . So if another vehicle comes into view around the bend and it is less than 46metres away the sitaution is not good.
Utterly bizarre decision. Clearly overtaking in a dangerous place and therefore Careless driving.
It's like the police decided to ignore any offence but close pass even though the overtaking was enough on its own.
Maybe not such close pass? But it was certainly a dangerous overtake across double continuous lines and with an oncoming vehicle that had to slow down to avoid a collision. Why this doesn't count as driving without due care and attention escapes me.
I have a lot of experience of this type of offence. As far as the police are concerned, cyclists are always travelling at less than 10 mph no matter that the video and GPS speedo show the cyclist speed at over 20 mph, so it is always legal to overtake them by crossing unbroken white lines. This dodge is invariably applied despite, as in this case, it was clearly unsafe to overtake because of the oncoming vehicle which the offending driver avoided by sharply swerving in. The problem is that the police are very, very thick and don't have the attention span to read the full section of the Highway Code that deals with this. This is also why, in Lancashire at least, they can't work out the complicated stuff about ASLs at traffic lights- I have described before how they think that (even though the driver has ignored those tiresome and difficult words about amber lights) if you can speed up enough to cross the ASL before the lights turn red you are legally entitled to keep going across the Stop Line.
Were the double white lines added after the video was submitted? Or is there some special filter at the police station?
Makes you wonder, if it had been a cop car following behind, would they have pulled the guy over for crossing the double white lines? Was the cyclist doing under 10mph?
TBH, I'm none too bothered when motorists cross double whites to overtake me, I'd far rather that than that they squeeze past me whilst keeping within the lines, and I don't much care for them sticking on my tail either (no eeyore jokes).
Makes you wonder, if it had been a cop car following behind, would they have pulled the guy over for crossing the double white lines?
No, not up here anyway. They spend their time 'not noticing' offences like illegal number plates etc, no doubt with their ANPR cameras turned off so they don't see all the No MOT offenders. Red Polo SG14 OKV had to swerve in very close to me to avoid the oncoming Transit closing at a relative speed of 60+ mph. Usual total lack of response from OpSnapLancs
For what it's worth, I was sat at a crossroads just this Wednesday in my car. Just as my lights turned green, I went to move and much to my amazement a very large construction lorry went through the bisecting light on a very late red.
On the opposing set of lights, right at the front of the queue was a police car and they did absolutely nothing, despite it being a blatant and highly dangerous move in front of their eyes.
What made it worse is I had both 2 and 4 year old girls in the car with me - lucky I didn't move off...
There's more than one kind of cop, and car. There used to be a Traffic Division responsible for major roads and motorways specifically interested in driving standards. With the reduction in police funding and the introduction of Highways Agency Traffic Officers (HATOs) on the motorway network the majority of Chief Constables decided that Traffic Division was a luxury they could not afford, and replaced them with multi role police officers, i.e. without the specific training and competency in traffic matters.
Thus the average person in a police car has no more training than the DVLA driving license the same as the general public. So driving a marked police vehicle is no guarantee of any interest in road traffic policing or great knowledge of the road traffic acts...
Feel free to lobby your PCC on the priority of road danger reduction.
Cops have a point about the car being squarely in the other lane, so it's not a "close pass" by any stretch. Whether it's a safe manoeuvre in the circumstances, is another matter.
Yep. Police decided to review under close pass rather then the rest of the video of white lines and oncoming traffic. Even the op mentioned it wasn't the closeness of the vehicle to him which was the concern. I'm assuming there is a statement facility when submitting these. Was it read?
This is why my statements always list the (alleged) offences. Not that I expect it makes any difference at all.
Yes, I pretty much stated as such in my submission. I even said that the driver did initially give me plenty of room, but that there is absolutely no way the driver could have known if the road ahead was clear or not, therefore overtaking on the solid lines at this point was not acceptable, and certainly not safe. The oncoming car having to slow to avoid a collision confirmed that. They chose to ignore that bit and focus purely on the closeness of the pass.
Thankfully in this case I have been able to lodge an appeal and the video was reviewed by another assessor, and they disagreed with the initial assessment. The driver is now getting a letter.
The driver is now getting a letter
Standard dodge for when they think the primary Fob-Off isn't working. Letters are the same thing as nothing at all.
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