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news
Near Miss of the Day 842: Passenger jumps out of car to remonstrate with cyclist… after driver cuts corner and almost hits him
Most cyclists, I’m sure, have heard that well-worn and tattered phrase, “get off the road!”, at some point or another, usually uttered with spiteful venom out of a passing car’s window. However, I doubt many have heard it coming from a passenger stood smack bang in the middle of the road themselves.
Well, that’s the bizarre situation road.cc reader Gareth found himself in while out on his bike in October.
While stopped at the junction of Brynteg road and Pontardulais Road in Penyrheol, Swansea, Gareth is almost struck head on by a driver who – clearly oblivious to the cyclist’s presence – attempted to cut the corner, before hitting the brakes just in time.
> Near Miss of the Day 841: Impatient drivers squeeze past cyclists on dark country lane
But unlike most of our near misses, that close call only marks the start of this particular story. After Gareth expresses his discontent with the motorist’s questionable turning method, the driver proceeds to pass him… on the wrong side of the road.
With the vehicle still moving, the car’s passenger – clearly unhappy that the cyclist made a note of the driver’s dangerous manoeuvre – jumps out for a round of detailed analysis, prompting one of the more bizarre exchanges witnessed on Near Miss of the Day.
“Listen now, I saw you, she wasn’t cutting [the corner],” the passenger, now standing in the road in front of the cyclist, says.
“What do you mean, she wasn’t cutting the corner?” comes Gareth’s baffled reply.
Then, delivered with a startling lack of self-awareness, the woman shouts at the cyclist to “get off the road” before he’s on the receiving end of yet more dodgy driving.
After Gareth, understandably, asks why he’s the recipient of a verbal lashing after a motorist cut the corner of a junction, almost hitting him, our protective passenger replies: “Because you’re standing still there and there’s other traffic, and you’ll cause an accident.”
As the cyclist, presumably shaking his head, finally rides off, strains of “we said sorry!” – and a few other things – fade away into the distance.
Blimey.
Speaking to road.cc, Gareth reckons that his close call, and the rather baffling stand-off that followed, provide an indication of "just how ‘anti-cyclist’ people have become”.
Or maybe it just tells us not to get on the wrong side of a Swansea mum…
> Near Miss of the Day turns 100 —a 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.
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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67 comments
if you dont know how drive, send a cow to argue for you....
She is one of the Swansea Tafia family!
I can't believe that someone hasn't recognised Rhonda and published her name yet. Surely she wants to be as famous as Ronnie?
Unbelievably bad driving.
And not that it would have helped here - such was the extent of corner cutting - but I've started stopping about 4 feet away from the centre of the road if I'm turning right - after having a few too many cars cut the corner off the lane.
Just sloppy driving. Muppets.
ffwcwit
I still cannot beleive that the welsh word for fuckwit is.......ffwcwit!
Mae'r Sais yn dda iawn am eu wneud nhw. Felly mae'n mwy hawdd i fenthyg y geiriau Saesneg.
Google translate renders that as "The English are very good at making them. So it is easier to borrow the English words".
Like tacsi and sgriwdreifer
Without wanting to be disrespectful to Welsh speakers there is an amusing line in Kingsley Amis' The Old Devils (set in Swansea where he taught for over a decade): something like "They joined the line waiting at the sign reading 'Taxi/Tacsi' for the benefit of any Welsh people who had never encountered the letter X before."
Quite. Since 100% of adult Welsh speakers in the UK are bilingual, it's natural enough that English words are borrowed a lot. Unlike English though Welsh respells borrowings so the reader only needs to know one spelling system. Welsh is phonetic so words that aren't pronounced how they're spelt really stick out. In English they're par for the course 😀
Yeah that. English has so many swear words there's no need to invent new ones. Mind you, call your mate a cont in Caernarfon and he'll buy you a pint. Don't try it with a complete stranger...
This is just a reminder that we could spend trillions on education but the belligerently dumb will always be with us. Thousands of years from now, if the human race survives that long, a segment of society that is terminally/willfully stupid will remain. We might have spread throughout the galaxy, but there will still be people who insist that, despite the clear rule set by the Interstellar Transportation Council in the year 10,191 that you must go clockwise around a black hole, it is their right to go anti-clockwise, if it'll get them home in time to watch Coronation Planet or X³-Factor.
Nice rant but seriously we're already half way there you've seen idiocracy right? Am guessing that specific passenger is just ahead of the curve in terms of stupidity 🤣
Brawndo's got what motorists crave!
The problem is clearly that they aren't being taught enough maths.
Gareth if you're reading this, and you haven't already done so, please submit to OpSnap! Judging by the angry passenger's comments, it was her that prevented the driver from plouging into you. Clear incompetence, and a total disregard for other road users. Only a matter of time until they hurt someone.
Never mind, I just noticed that it happened in October last year. Clearly too late for a submission.
I thought I recognised the look of those houses... I love Swansea, this is just perfect.
Looking at it from a glass half full perspective, maybe she was trying to be helpful in that she felt compelled to warn the cyclist that the driver is as blind as a bat, totally incompetent and was warning him that it was best in his own interest not to be on the road while she was driving around ! 🤔
HA this is ace.. I can actually hear her going home and telling her whole family about how she had to get out of the car because a cyclist was in the middle of the road and how she told him he needed to be more careful. Brilliant!
I always thought Welsh dragons were mythical, apparently not
I've just watched it with the sound on. Absolute madness. I cannot believe that woman thought that there was any way she could justify the driver's actions or attack the cyclist... Unbelievable
Attack is the best means of defence. The human capacity for twisting things around completely never ceases to amaze me.
I know it's traditional to reach a certain age and think that things are getting worse, a tradition I generally try to resist. However, I do think corner cutting is getting worse and I don't understand why... it's not just younger drivers either. Surely there is nothing that screams "I'm really shit at driving" than an inability to stay on the right side of the road during a simple manouvre.
Pair of fucking morons*. Shouldn't be allowed metal cutlery let alone be in charge of a vehicle.
*moron in English, not in Welsh though the intellect level is similar.
Absolutely bobon. The amount of times I've had to slam on, when driving, because of the corner cutting moron, CCM, is beyond belief.
I watched the video thinking 'this is normal driving', why the fuss?
^Very much this.
I agree, it's not just corner-cutting - I think general driving standards have got a lot worse. It's most likely because you never see police cars out now, they seem to just rely on fixed speed cameras, rather than officers pulling people up for general bad driving that isn't speeding.
You must not have got the memo. There are two scenarios where it's OK to drive like a tosser:
1. If it saves you two seconds but you are happy to stop for a minute to rant or abuse another road user.
2. If it saves you the effort of moving your foot from the gas to the brake pedal.
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