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news
Near Miss of the Day 888: Police to take action against driver who emergency stopped "six inches" from cyclist and seven-year-old son after "blindly following car in front"
The Metropolitan Police have taken prompt action against the driver seen in today's Near Miss of the Day footage emergency braking to avoid a collision with a father cycling with his son in a cargo bike, after the motorist "blindly" followed the driver in front at a turning.
road.cc reader Ashley tells us the Met has confirmed a Notice of Intended Prosecution has been sent to the driver in relation to this incident which happened at the weekend while he cycled with his son in a cargo bike southbound on CS7 along the A3 Clapham Road between Oval and Stockwell.
"As you can see in the footage I was riding along towards the traffic light junction with a green light for me to proceed," he recalled. "It was getting dark so most vehicles had their lights on. I had two bright front lights as well as flashing blue lights on my wheel spokes. The bike is massive and well-illuminated in all directions so there is zero excuse for not seeing it.
"There are two drivers waiting in the right hand turn section and the first car waits for the white car to pass before crossing the junction without any problem. For some reason the Mercedes driver decides to blindly follow the car in front and has to perform an emergency stop to avoid crashing into the side of my bike where my son was sitting.
"The driver stops around six inches from the side of my bike. Naturally I shouted at the driver, and I am surprised at myself for not swearing more or getting off my bike and really remonstrating with the driver but I had my son with me so didn't want to escalate things.
"The driver gave no sign of acknowledgment or apology for such appalling driving. I have reported to the Met Police and they confirmed they have sent a Notice of Intended Prosecution to the driver."
Ashley said this is the second "serious incident" of a near miss he has experienced on London's roads while cycling with his son, the first being the footage from November 2022 which went viral and became the topic of discussion on TV shows and in the national press.
London mayoral candidate Susan Hall and former chancellor Sajid Javid were two Conservative politicians who weighed in on the wide-reaching discussion about the video, Jeremy Vine covering it on his Channel 5 show and the footage being viewed millions of times on social media.
> 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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The original video mentioned at the bottom of the article made me change how I cycle with my kids. I now keep one alongside and one on the tandem so we basically take the lane and force drivers to stop if there's no room and it's our RoW. Hate that it has to become combative but without doing this drivers still close pass/left hook/drive straight at us despite the kids being 5 and 9.
That junction is on my daily commute home. Something about its design seems to encourage this type of bad behaviour by drivers.
I watch drivers in that turn lane extremely carefully. I'm more surprised if one gives way to me than if one carries on through the turn like the driver in the video.
None of this in any way excuses the dreadful driving. But it is a real hotspot for this kind of conduct.
It's on my daily commute too. For me, it's less that drivers don't give way, but it's that they start to turn as though they are not going to. Many of them do then stop - and probably always intended to, they were just trying to save a split second for after you'd gone - but of course you don't know that so have to brake just in case. So in the end it stresses you and slows them down anyway.
It's just as bad coming out of Caldwell Street (the road the driver in the video is turning into), as I often am around rush hour. Wanting to turn right it's usually watch for your light to go green then wait for the three or four drivers turning in who've decided they've had to wait too long and so they won't bother waiting through another cycle...
Mind you, it's not only drivers who act like tits round that junction at times...
https://twitter.com/Rendel_Harris/status/1630648153664790540
There are some weirdly dangerous junctions with, to my mind, no obvious reason for it. There is a mini roundabout near me that is not on my normal cycling routes but which I often use when driving. Turn right at the roundabout, indicate in good time. It's well marked and signposted. So many times drivers going straight on the other way (ie I have priority) fail to give way and I have to hit the brakes. So bad at one stage that I had to check whether my indicators were working. They were. Other similar roundabouts nearby, no problem at all. No idea what it is about this one.
It's not on my daily commute but it's near where I live and I often go that way too. I've seen similar driving.
That section of CS7 is appalling, nowhere near the standard of other Cycleways in London. I don't know why it hasn't been upgraded. Compare it to the newly built CS4, it;'s a world apart. I don't know if the blue paint actually makes it more dangerous as there isn't even a solid white line here. Maybe the drivers eye just concentrates on the black tarmac and not the blue area and so there is sub-concious blindness to the path the bikes are on.
Having commuted along what is now CS7 since the late 1990s, I initially thought the introduction of the CS was a good thing - both the initial blue paint and now the intermittent wands, bus stop bypasses and short properly segregated sections. But it does now feel very poor compared with later infrastructure, as you say.
It's similar when being overtaken: So often it is the second, third or fouth driver in line who executes the most dangerous maneouvre, assuming that everything's fine just because those in front of them have done it, or thinking that it's "unfair" that others might get passed but that they'd have to wait a few more seconds.
I think there's an aspect of joining the collective car conga that makes people think they're absolved of any individual responsibility
Its the number one reason I hate driving in any built up area. I can cycle for hours in the countryside with almost zero issues. As soon as I come back into civilisation its carnage. As soon as one person pulls off an overtake, everyone does because obviously it was safe when the cyclist isn't bleeding on the ground.
I think one of the big problems (which I also encounter in the countryside, to be fair) is that drivers don't account for the movement of the cyclist over time, so the first person may make a perfect other-side-of-the-road pass and the drivers behind all follow the same line, but what they don't account for is that the cyclist will be further up the road so each successive motorist returns to the lane closer and closer to the cyclist, getting ever more dangerous even though they think they are making a good safe wide pass. It really should say in the Highway Code (maybe it does and I've missed it) that no driver should commence an overtaking manouevre before any overtaking vehicle ahead has fully returned to its lane.
Although it is very worrying that so many drivers forget this… Is it maybe like a subset of Schrödinger's Cyclist (too fast/too slow/stationary)?
a problem even with a single vehicle, once they get alongside they start pulling in as if they were passing a static object.
In my driving lessons I was taught to only pull in when the vehicle overtaken appears in the inside mirror...
I've noticed that when I've overtaken a cyclist, always leaving a very large gap, the car behind me will usually follow suit and overtake properly too.
This is fairly common round here, so you have to suspect such actions at all times- mostly they have no thought of looking out for anything other than a large motor vehicle. The usual one is charging straight across the wrong way round a mini-roundabout (right of the central paint circle), heedless of the cyclist on their right (me) already on the roundabout. PS watch out for the police abandoning the prosecution for some stupid pro-car reason!
Clearly a driver who believes motorists have the right-of-way everywhere. She/he is probably pissed that Ashley didn't stop, and I'm confident the "Ashley was endangering his son'' crowd will soon be weighing in. The widespread belief that roads are for motor vehicles - period - is the greatest problem cyclists almost everywhere face.
Don't tell 'motorists' that their car/van etc has an engine . . . and E-bikes (& other EVs) are the ones with motors!
Yes! That's the pedantic reason for the names of these famous car companies:
The Ford Engine Company
General Engines
The British Engine Corporation
Morris Engines Limited
and of course why Triumph, BMW, Honda, etc. make those speedy two-wheeled conveyances called either "enginebikes" or "enginecycles."
I think "engineer" has more cachet than "motorist". ICE, ICE baby!
Putting on my overalls now...
EDIT as for enginebikes, you're presumably referring to the Reitwagen or earlier steam velocipedes?
You think the word "engineer" has cachet? Sweet!
As a network engineer I would say that it does. I'm a highly skilled and experienced IT professional.
The older definition of engineer absolutely, but then people started applying it to all kinds of non engineering roles and its lost its meaning.
Both 'motor' and 'engine' refer to a machine that converts other forms of energy into movement. It is purely convention that we refer to electrical motors and internal combustion engines.
Indeed, from the Latin meaning simply "mover". The OED in fact makes a point of saying "a machine, especially one powered by electricity or internal combustion, that supplies motive power."
That is absolutely not clear at all; what is far more likely is the driver didn't check properly before moving into the intersection but then saw the cyclist and stopped to give way; I see many dash-cam videos where drivers fail to give way to other cars in identical circumstances to this video, so this is not a 'driver hates cyclists' scenario like with punishment passes.