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news
Near Miss of the Day 812: Van driver hits cyclist during impatient overtake on country lane
UPDATE: 10/8/2022 Warwickshire Police asked the cyclist to remove the video from YouTube as they intend to investigate, so it has been made private. We will update this story with the outcome of the investigation.
'If a van towing a trailer hits your bike on the way past, is it still a near miss?' can join 'if a tree falls in the forest' and 'how much wood would a woodchuck chuck' in the pantheon of brain-melting philosophical questions...
That's the context for today's Near Miss of the Day submission where, you guessed it, a van driver towing a trailer hit our reader, first with a wing mirror to the back, and second, when the trailer's load then smacked into the rider's bike on the way through.
> Near Miss of the Day 811: Van driver pushes cyclist against kerb
"The annoying thing was that I could hear something approaching fast behind me so I made an attempt to get out the way but they never let me complete that before charging through as if I wasn't there," road.cc reader Jaime told us.
"I reported the incident via Warwickshire Police's website last Sunday afternoon. I have an acknowledgement of that upload but I suspect it's too early to expect a response."
road.cc has contacted the company whose branding is plastered all over the vehicle and will update this story with comment if provided.
"I'm presently a witness waiting to go to court for another incident from last year where myself and two other friends were victims of a road rage attack whilst cycling on country lanes near here when we were badly cut up, then threatened with violence for merely being on the road," Jaime added.
"These things seem to be happening more an more often in the Solihull/Warwickshire area."
> 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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30 comments
This is just another police dodge- they sit about thinking of something to complain about and then use it as an excuse to do nothing. In my case, before Lancashire Constabulary decided they could get away with doing nothing about anything ever, there was a prosecution over very dangerous speeding on the wrong side of double white lines when I was doing 25 mph that went through all the stages, until the police cancelled it because there was no rear facing camera footage. If there had been they'd have gone with 'no overhead footage'. It is difficult to fail to despise the police for being so useless and hostile to cyclist complaints
Say it ain't true.
UPDATE
Sadly as the police had taken so long to get back to me on my Operation SNAP upload I'd sort of given up. Typically just as I'd shared with Dan at Road.cc., the police got in touch the day after to confirm they intended to peruse this one. They asked me to remove from all social media as I'd disclosed the share based on their slow response time which of course I complied with.
Several months of radio silence later, and a lot of chasing for an update from me, they've finally confirmed that they did actually issue a 'Notice of Intended Prosecution' to the registered keeper but then later decided not to follow-up as the driver responded that he was concerned as his personal information had been unfairly shared on social media and had received a lot of harassment (not from me I might add) on his website. So Warwickshire Police dropped the case and he got away with it.... very disappointing and weak response by Warwickshire Police IMHO but I accept sharing killed this, so a valuable lesson learnt!
If I were you, I'd raise it as a complaint. I don't see how they can excuse a RTC with events that happen afterwards. They should prosecute the RTC and if necessary investigate any harrassment the driver received as well.
I'm fairly confident that the law doesn't work the way they seem to be applying it as otherwise I'd be going out and robbing banks and posting the footage on social media and complain about the harrassment.
Also, has their insurance company been informed of the RTC?
(As an aside, when I got hit by a non-aggressive van driver, I asked the A&S police officer about sharing the video on Road.cc and he was absolutely fine with it)
I don't see why sharing should kill it, TBH.
Definitely raise a complaint, there is absolutely no justification in dropping the case on those grounds; if the driver feels he has been unfairly harassed or threatened that is an entirely separate case. Take it to its logical extreme, if (God forbid) he'd killed you and the police had released the footage to try and trace the driver or appeal for witnesses, would they then have let him off when they found him on the basis that some people had said unkind things about his dangerous behaviour online? Absolutely ludicrous, if I were you I would consider going straight to the IOPC.
very disappointing and weak response by Warwickshire Police IMHO but I accept sharing killed this, so a valuable lesson learnt!
The wrong lesson, I'm afraid. They would have thought up some other dodge anyway!
Personal Information? It is a business account. That he has publicised all over his van. There is no name, home address or anything on there that would be classed as personal information.
The police and the shyster defence lawyer would describe the registration as personal information!
Interestingly, the telephone number on the back of the van is a mobile number, which would indicate that the business is a one-person-band. Also interestingly, the address given for the business is currently for sale (£3.6m, so someone's been doing OK). Arranging a viewing and then popping a couple of raw prawns down the back of a sofa would be childish and petty, so I wouldn't advocate that.
I was knocked off in a similar fashion by someone towing a horsebox that was wider than their car. I had a minor bit of road rash and some torn bar tape. The driver stopped and we exchanged details. Imagine my surprise when I was contacted by his insurer and offered £5,000, without even having to ask.
Needless to say, I bit their hand off and "invested" in n+1.
Wow - I was not so lucky.... Police decicded to drop the case as the video had been shared on social media yet had sent him intent to prosecute warning - disapointing
It's showing as a private video for me too
Fixed now - enjoy
The video appears to have gone missing. I assume the matter is now in the hands of her majesty's finest...
Still works for me.
Ow!! Works for me now. Terrible driving, but a routine experience unfortunately.
Door mirror.
Somebody's going to say it, it might as well be me.
Terrible piece of driving. Deserves at least a sternly worded letter.
Nope! No sign of swerving or braking there! According to the Essex Assessment Protocol, this means there was no offence. There remains No Offence until the cyclist and any camera are smashed up, at which point it becomes Insufficient Evidence
"Is it still a near miss if the driver's wing mirror and towing load hits you?"
Technically, being hit could be classed as a near miss as they have failed to miss the rider and hit them instead. The videos you show where a driver passes closely without hitting the rider are near hits and not near misses.
Technically, no.
Yep and Punishment Passes are Cowards Passes
Regarding the anger towards cyclists even daring to exist - if social media has told us one thing, it is that there are some very unpleasant people around. And one thing social media has done via its algorithms is put these unpleasant people together, so they can reinforce their nastiness. So now we don't have lone twats; we have emboldened twats with the confidence that they're not alone in their twatishness.
In a 5 hour ride today we had half a dozen incidents. We had two drivers leaning on their horn while executing the cycling safety pass (which involves flooring the accelerator and grossly exceeding the speed limit). It doesn't seem to occur that there are two possibilities:
1) if you can pass a group of cyclists at speed with one hand on the horn without effort to drive safely, then you have not been obstructed.
2) if you have been obstructed, ploughing through at speed is aggressive and dangerous driving.
Our real gem was the "blind corner rule" where you may always overtake cyclists on blind bends as there can never be anything coming - though they didn't expect to have to swerve to avoid a bright pink 40 tonne HGV that crept up on them unnoticed.
However, today was a good day, in total a minute or so of danger out of 5 hours.
My commute is 7 minutes each way, I probably average 3 incidents a day varying from "what is this twat doing?" to "oh fuck I almost died." 5 hours with only a handful of incidents must have been some nice quiet roads. The unfortunate thing is that on those nice quiet roads the speeds are so much higher that when one of those drivers risking your life to save a few seconds overestimates their gap the results are much more devastating.
The number of dangerous, high speed close passes into oncoming traffic I recieve as I cycle past a school makes me sure that there is no talking drivers into doing better. They need to have their licenses removed and their cars crushed over this stuff.
Hit and run, surely?
The "hit and run" offence (S170 RTA 1988) only applies if there has been personal injury or damage to property. Simply making physical contact, if no injury or damage occurs, is not enough to trigger the requirement to stop. The video is now private and the description of the events given don't make it clear whether or not any injury or damage occured.
There is an argument it could be prosecuted as "assault by beating" which is the term for an assault with battery that doesn't cross the threshold into Actual Bodily Harm (which is probably a similar threshold to "injury" under the RTA) - "battery" is committed if there is any application of unlawful force to a person, no matter how slight, and nor does it have to be intentional. https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/offences-against-person-incorporat...
Damage can be requiring new handle bar tape or a new lever cover or paint damage. There is no way that zero damage was caused.
My actual damage was a ripped RH glove (plus a small cut where the trailor his me) and a nasty graze to the lycra on my right leg Rapha shorts
"nasty graze to the lycra on my right leg Rapha shorts"
So about a grand's worth then.