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news
Near Miss of the Day 876Near Miss of the Day 876: Oncoming driver tells cyclist to “get off the f***ing road”, as rider blasts police inaction
While this latest instalment in our Near Miss of the Day series is far from the most dramatic incident we’ve had submitted to us over the years, the clip – thanks in so small part to the vitriol aimed in the cyclist’s direction by a motorist clearly unhappy at being forced to give way to someone on a bike – nonetheless highlights the often depressing reality of cycling on British roads.
Meanwhile, the cyclist’s experience of dealing with local police forces (spoiler – it’s not great) also emphasises the need for greater resources and will to tackle dangerous and careless driving around cyclists.
The incident, which took place on St Paul’s Hill in Winchester, Hampshire on Thursday evening, saw road.cc reader Nick approach a bin lorry as he made his way up the slope. After slowing to give way to a number of motorists, Nick eventually makes his way between the bin lorry and the row of parked cars on the other side of the road, just as another oncoming driver approaches.
Evidently irked by the need to brake to avoid hitting a person riding a bike, the driver leans out of his car window as Nick passes, telling the cyclist in no uncertain terms to “get off the f***ing road” – an unprompted diatribe that prompts the clearly startled rider to respond: “You’re on camera!”
Nick, who described the encounter as “typical for many cyclists”, has reported the incident to Hampshire Constabulary, through the force’s Hants SNAP reporting portal.
However, he told road.cc that, based on his previous experience of reporting incidents to Hampshire Constabulary, the chances of a follow up are “approaching zero” – despite the county frequently featuring high in the list of UK areas when it comes to the number of road incidents involving cyclists (in 2019, for example, ten percent of the country’s cycling incidents occurred in Hampshire).
“In all the years of close passes, I’ve never had one follow up, and I’ve had several incidents on this stretch of road,” Nick says.
“I cycle into town – around 10 mins – in Winchester to shop or go to the sports centre, several times each week, and I reckon I have an average of one close pass-type incident every 10 minutes, so two a journey.
“Rural roads are dangerous too, and there’s been lots of horrendous footage I’ve submitted, but never acted upon. I cycled daily in London for my commute for about 25 years, before all the bike lanes, but as per many friends, I feel Winchester is far more dangerous.”
> Hampshire Police stop 20 drivers and 185 cyclists during close pass operation
He continued: “We have an under-funded local group of cops, who obviously don’t have the resources to deal with this, unless it results in injury of fatality. of which there have been some recently.
“I’ve previously requested close pass data from Hants Road Police, who refused this – under a Freedom of Information request – on the basis of time, cost, and resources. I suspect very little action is taken.
“Do British police forces consider cyclists as legitimate road kill?”
> 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 Twitter or 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
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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OK here we go. It would have been better if the motorist hadn't been rude to the cyclist and he probably could have been going a bit slower around a blind bend but it's up to the cyclist to get past the lorry before any omcoming car arrives. I'm afraid I would have thanked the driver for slowing down and apologised. It really pisses me off when drivers do what the cyclist did here to me when I'm cycling.
As for the police, I agree 100% that their response to submitted video footage is not usually helpful but this is a poor example to use to demonstrate that.
That's not quite true. What the highway code says about this scenario, is you should give way to oncoming vehicles before beginning the overtake. If there's nobody immediately visible to give way to, then once you are passing, it's just a narrow bit of road. If an oncoming vehicle appears, they have no more right to that space than you - even if they might think it's 'their side of the road'.
Now in this case, the vehicle looks to have turned out of a side road just as the cyclist begins to pass the lorry. When the cyclist began the move, the vehicle was travelling slowly and there was plenty of time. However, the merc driver puts his foot down and accelerates towards the cyclist. Should the cyclist have anticipated this acceleration? Well perhaps they should, but at the point when they made the overtake the vehicle was travelling at a speed that didn't require them to give way. The acceleration of the car caused the issue.
Fair point. I hadn't noticed the acceleration but as far as I can see the car was visible as the cyclist sets off so I still think it's not the best example to use for police inaction.
it's not the best example to use for police inaction
Doesn't really matter if it's not the best, as there is a virtually infinite supply of examples of police inaction which leads to the same offences being repeated over and over again at the same location
https://upride.cc/incident/po18osk_vwtransporter_closepass/ 5.9.23
https://upride.cc/incident/g6noope10zvf_vwaudi_veryclosepass/ 10.11.19
In terms of traffic law, then yep, it's here-nor-there. It's the bullying and abuse that's worse. Imagine if you walked into a supermarket carrying a baseball bat and told someone to get the f* out of the way. It just seems acceptable behaviour on the roads, but it wouldn't be tolerated anywhere else.
I'm the cyclist involved, and your description is correct - and appreciate your response, above. I'd (properly) given way, and traffic was building behind behind me in that waiting position on the hill. I know, from experience, on this stretch of road that cars will shoot past, so I looked behind, then ahead and pulled out, just as the car came off the mini-roundabout ahead.
The reason I posted this was because it's so *unexceptional* to get abuse and hassle even on short journeys. Or the rate of abuse/bad driving per metre is high and routine.
Even if I should have waited longer (moot point, didn't see the car until I was moving forward, having checked behind), I still have priority on the hill, and there's no excuse for the aggro. If the guy had slowed down, I'd have acknowledged this, but he accelerated. More to the point, there were two bin men behind that lorry. The angry driver's brain is (as per using mobile phones), now not working properly for the next 30 secs. He could easily have accelerated off into those guys, emerging from behind the lorry!
I'd also make the point that whilst the comment you replied to and a couple of others are that we should accept and normalise this as 'meh', we wouldn't if we were cycling in, say, Denmark. When events like this link below don't even end in prosecution (a friend cycling in Yorkshire), when and where should the police start to act. Seems to me not from the worst (though that would be a start) but from the normalised that we cyclists accept, but shouldn't... https://road.cc/content/news/nmotd-806-driver-reverses-cyclist-and-runs-...
Here's another close pass (common) on the same stretch of road, that the police didn't act upon when I reported it via HantsWeb. Hants Police refuse to disclose how many close pass prosecutions they bring (or sucess of such): https://x.com/nicktweet/status/1549357228691529729?s=20
We all have these places where we regularly get close passed, bullied out the way or abuse shouted. There's a short section of the A-road through our town that's always a problem area for me.
I recently submitted three reports to the police, just on this particular stretch, of the sort of dodgy driving I experience. The response to one of these was a bit of a snotty reply that the driver 'did their best', that it 'wasn't a bend' (it is) and I'd held them up for a 'considerable length of time' (50 seconds - at 12mph, in a street I wouldn't drive much faster in anyway). They said as it wasn't a bend (it is), my evidence was not credible. The other reports I've heard nothing.
But even if all those reports were acted upon, I don't think it would solve the problem. So, I've taken to being even more assertive with road positioning there and occassionally using the pavement and/or the pedestrian crossing lights to make things safer for me. Raising the issue with the council might be a better use of time than sending reports to the police in this particular instance.
As for the priority uphill, I don't think this would apply in your case. It's rule 155 and is particular to single track roads.
I've long copied the Council in. And cycling on the pavement then becomes a 'cyclists!'. Also, the bin men were there. I take your point about the letter of the law. My point is we accept too low a threshold for normal. The Police need to work on this from both ends, imho.
Hey Nick, like the photo. Are you Jason Wyngarde in disguise?
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That was my thought too when I saw it
Indeed!
Ah. In which case perhaps I owe an apology to the driver I lambasted for steaming downhill towards me here.
Yes, it wouldn't apply there either. If the obstruction was on your side, you would still have to yield before passing it, even though you are going uphill. If there's obstructions on both sides then courtesy says you let the cyclist through (I'd do so whether going up or downhill in a car), but there's no actual defined priority as such.
Utter garbage, you're so wrong here I'll suggest you're a troll. I suggest you re-read the Highway Code and educate yourself. Particularly WRT to rule 167.
DO NOT overtake where you might come into conflict with other road users. For example <snip> when you would force another road user to swerve or slow down
The cyclist had priority as its first come first serve. He started the overtake first - he gets to complete it without being abuses or a vehicle being used as a weapon.
Errr - Bungle is not a troll and has had provided a few NMOTD episodes too.
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Jeeze, calm down. Bike Fascist has to spoil a reasonable discussion.
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You, of course
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Being the exemplar
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Of someone
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Who never chucks crap
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Into a reasonable discussion
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In these parts.
I think I must have misunderstood the video. It seems to me that it is the cyclist who is overtaking, the car seems to be on their own side of the road at all times. It seems to me that the cyclist is forcing the driver to slow down not the other way round.
I fully accept that I missed the deliberate acceleration of the car prior to it's braking, difficult to see from the video I think, and I am certainly not excusing the driver for their use of langauage. My point was simply that there are much better examples of poor driving around cyclists to demonstrate that the police are not doing their job than this one. If we want the police to act then it seems to me that we need to be obeying the highway code 100%, otherwise any half decent defence lawyer can make a case for dismissing any charge the police may bring if the driver chooses to go to court.
In this case I think that the cyclist is complainig about the driver accelerating at him and then braking and swearing at him when, obviously, the driver should have slowed to allow the cyclist to pass and kept quiet. A fair point and once again I hold my hands up for not realising that the driver accelerated first.
I also disagree with this concept of first come first served, or to put it another way, the cyclist was "established". I can find no mention of this in the highway code other than it stating that any road user should avoid a collision if at all possible. That of course gives an excuse to the bullying behaviour which drivers exhibit when they overtake parked cars and force cyclists to slow down, sometimes quite sharply, or even to have to swerve, to avoid a collision.
I have explained my view of the incident and apologised for not recognising the acceleration. If that makes me a troll so be it.
I am really confused as to where this Mercedes has come from. As the car in front moves past the cyclist and the cyclist pulls round the bin lorry, you can see the driver's side of the Mercedes in the distance - suggesting it has turned right onto the road at the roundabout.
If I reverse the footage back a few frames and look between the car and the bin lorry - I don't see the Mercedes moving from left to right - it just appears once the car moves past the cyclist.
I think the silver car comes from the road which is the second exit to the mini roundabout from the cyclists point of view. It is just visible in the video as the cyclist sets off to overtake the bin lorry. If I am right it would have effectively been turning left or taking the first exit off the mini roundabout from their point of view. It would therefore not be going from left to right and would only appear as it rounds the bend and passes the parked cars. The car that follows the silver car comes from the same road.
Except we can see the drivers side of the car - not sure how we could see that side if it was coming from (to the cyclist) a right hand bend?
meh - i'm probably reading too much into it. First glance, I thought he had reversed onto the roundabout from another exit - but there is just solid wall there!
That was a gimme. His road position on approach to the cyclist was aggressive.
I would've emptied my right nostril all over his angry face. A sort of "money shot". But better.
Always keep a bit in reserve.
They drive straight at you when the obstruction is on your side of the road.
They drive straight at you when the obstruction is on their side of the road.
True. But on this one, it looked like Mr Gammon did slow - a bit late, so a bit close, and the verbalage was uncalled for, but IMO it wasn't actually dangerous.
I read the article before watching the clip, and I had expected that the bin lorry was going to be on the other side of the road (doesn't really matter for priority on this occasion, though, since the cyclist was "established" in the lane).
If I ran with a camera, I wouldn't have reported this to the police. YMMV.
I wouldn't have reported it, because it happens so often. But you just know that had the cyclist been driving a silver mercedes, the oncoming driver would not have made a scene like that.
I would definitely report that. There's no need for aggression and bullying vulnerable road users. It's behaviour like that that dissuades people from cycling and there's simply no need for it.
Ugh, gammon.
Should we start carrying a tin of pineapple chunks for use when the occasion arises?
I prefer an egg on mine
Heretic.
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