Near Miss of the Day 892: Cyclist squeezes on brakes to avoid overtaking driver — who still ends up hitting cyclist's safety flag

Our latest reader Near Miss of the Day submission is, in reality, barely a near miss, and shows the moment an impatient driver overtook a cyclist and cut across the lane, hitting the rider's safety flag. If it weren't for the cyclist braking hard and swerving away, the driver could very well have ended up running into him.

The close pass happened to Dr Grahame Cooper, also a member of the Bolton Active Travel Forum Technical Review Group on September 2, 2022 at the junction of Blackburn Rd and Belmont Road in Bolton.

As he crossed the traffic lights and made his way straight the driver accelerated from behind to come up level with him, and then cut across to go left at the last minute.

*Warning: The following video contains explicit language.*

"I was in the inside on Blackburn Road, approaching lane the point where Belmont Road peels off to the left, intending to continue up Blackburn Road," Dr Cooper told road.cc.

"The driver of this car came up the outside and swerved across me to turn up Belmont Road. If I hadn't braked heavily and swerved left, the driver would definitely have hit me at about 30mph."

He added: "The police took the case forward for possible prosecution but have not informed me what the outcome was."

road.cc contacted Greater Manchester Police for an update on the case and received a reply a week after the story was published, a contact at the force highlighting that in 2023 they received 5,078 video reports, each requiring a full review by a traffic officer (and sometimes requiring second opinions).

"As you can appreciate we are unable to chase up individual cases through to court, the work for the department with the staffing I have is at capacity," the inspector we spoke to told us. "Should we chase up every investigation it would then be detrimental to the ongoing demand coming in, which would impact on the service we can provide to all the contributors for footage submitted."

In the week before this story was originally published, Dr Cooper called out the Bolton Council for installing "discriminatory" barriers on a cycling and walking route in Bolton, apparently to prevent anti-social behaviour. The council later admitted that no equality impact assessment had been carried out pre-installation, but still believed that it has acted in accordance with design guidance.

He told road.cc: "They have admitted that they have not done that and there is no Equality Impact Assessment. This is particularly important if they are departing from national guidance. Before the barrier was installed, the 3.5-metre-wide path was perfectly adequate for shared cycling and walking use. Now that the barriers are in, there is conflict between the needs of people walking and cycling due to the bottleneck."

> 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