Video: TfL apologises to cyclist after bus driver calls him a “knob” following close pass

Joeinpoole wrote:

I thought I was alone in being unable to see "a close pass" in that video. The bus only began pulling back in when the front of it was well past the cyclist. At that point the bus was clearly the lead vehicle and it was the cyclist's responsibility to moderate his speed to avoid a collision..

If you cannot complete your manoeuvre in its entirety then it is not safe to initiate it. In the case of an overtake then there must be enough time and space for you to
1) Pull out in plenty of time, further back than YOUR thinking distance
2) Move past the vehicle being overtaken leaving a good safety margin
3) Pull ahead of the vehicle being overtaken so you don't cut in sharply taking THEIR thinking distance and then proceed pulling further ahead. All movements should be smooth and unhurried. If they're not then it's not safe!

I repeat, if you can't do this then it is NOT safe to overtake! Stay behind until it is safe. What is this bollocks about the bus being the lead vehicle. It was not the lead vehicle as it was alongside. It can only be the lead vehicle if it is clearly and unambiguously in front. i.e. When it has completed the overtake in its entirety!

Any more of this and there will be no jelly and ice-cream for tea!

levermonkey wrote:

Joeinpoole wrote:

I thought I was alone in being unable to see "a close pass" in that video. The bus only began pulling back in when the front of it was well past the cyclist. At that point the bus was clearly the lead vehicle and it was the cyclist's responsibility to moderate his speed to avoid a collision..

If you cannot complete your manoeuvre in its entirety then it is not safe to initiate it. In the case of an overtake then there must be enough time and space for you to
1) Pull out in plenty of time, further back than YOUR thinking distance
2) Move past the vehicle being overtaken leaving a good safety margin
3) Pull ahead of the vehicle being overtaken so you don't cut in sharply taking THEIR thinking distance and then proceed pulling further ahead. All movements should be smooth and unhurried. If they're not then it's not safe!

I repeat, if you can't do this then it is NOT safe to overtake! Stay behind until it is safe. What is this bollocks about the bus being the lead vehicle. It was not the lead vehicle as it was alongside. It can only be the lead vehicle if it is clearly and unambiguously in front. i.e. When it has completed the overtake in its entirety!

That might be the ideal but you might as well accept that it is not always going to happen on busy city roads where conditions can change in seconds. The traffic well in front of the bus came to a halt at the junction forcing the bus to brake before the overtaking manoeuvre was complete. What about the pedestrian that stepped into the road in front of the cyclist? Should he have been given a loud "Oi!" too?

Racing after the bus, for several hundred yards, in order to remonstrate with the driver was utterly ridiculous. No wonder so many motorists hate 'lycra lout' cyclists. The video poster's behaviour on the roads, as evidenced by his own 600-odd videos on Youtube (so not an obsession then?) constitute a prime example of a lycra lout in action.

at which point you just come back to if you cannot complete your manoeuvre in its entirety then it is not safe to initiate it, the bus is still "overtaking" at speed as they approach a zebra crossing, I know its london but occasionally pedestrians do use them, because although the bus then blocks most of the view you just catch sight that it has a pedestrian island refuge in the middle of the road.

Thats why the bus comes back in so far and quickly, it has to retake the road space or else hit the road furniture or the cyclist, then again they could just have accepted that they misjudged the available space, made a mistake and just rolled off the speed,maybe used the brakes and shared the road

so its a badly planned overtake the changing traffic conditions make no difference to that, there was an obstacle and not enough space to complete a safe pass, and the video amply demonstrates the bus isnt going any faster than the bike anyway and the driver knows theyve got to stop by its very nature more so than any other vehicle in the city.

as for the 600 videos thing, in 2 years, is that obsessive or simply a reflection of the types of driving standards we generally see, most daily commuters generally get at least one close pass per trip, we just arent videoing them all.

Joeinpoole wrote:

That might be the ideal but you might as well accept that it is not always going to happen on busy city roads where conditions can change in seconds. The traffic well in front of the bus came to a halt at the junction forcing the bus to brake before the overtaking manoeuvre was complete. What about the pedestrian that stepped into the road in front of the cyclist? Should he have been given a loud "Oi!" too?

Racing after the bus, for several hundred yards, in order to remonstrate with the driver was utterly ridiculous. No wonder so many motorists hate 'lycra lout' cyclists. The video poster's behaviour on the roads, as evidenced by his own 600-odd videos on Youtube (so not an obsession then?) constitute a prime example of a lycra lout in action.

I agree with Awavey, it's not that it's the ideal, it's written into the Highway Code (https://www.gov.uk/using-the-road-159-to-203/overtaking-162-to-169) that before overtaking you should make sure "the road is sufficiently clear ahead" and "there is a suitable gap in front of the road user you plan to overtake". The next Rule states (amongst other things) that "Overtake only when it is safe and legal to do so. You should not get too close to the vehicle you intend to overtake; move quickly past the vehicle you are overtaking, once you have started to overtake. Allow plenty of room. Move back to the left as soon as you can but do not cut in; give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car".

If the traffic conditions are so changeable, shouldn't the bus driver just wait? If he can only pull up beside the cyclist, he is not gaining any kind of advantage by overtaking him, just performing a manoeuvre badly and pointlessly that could endanger another persons life.

Pedestrians who step onto the road without looking or considering a bike worth stopping for probably deserve to know it's dangerous, not too sure if "Oi" is the best phrase for that though.

I guess chasing after the driver can be taken two ways, that he was looking for trouble and an idiot or that he wanted to try and let the bus driver know it was a bad overtake and to think before doing it again. Everyone will have heard the quote by Burke ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing’, if we just let bad drivers continue to drive badly, that situation could happen to another person who is less comfortable with a bus driving next to them, or the driver may next time mis-judge it worse and have to swing over more to avoid road furniture. I guess at least this way, there is a chance that the driver may think twice before pulling the same overtake, especially after it was reported and posted on YouTube.

Neil753 wrote:

The cyclist isn't blameless here. Ok, the driver made a mistake, but to deliberately carry on riding between the bus and the kerb, rather than just scrubbing off some speed, does indeed make the rider look like a knob, and a pretty dangerous knob at that.

Guys, this is the second "cyclist vs bus" vid you've highlighted recently, where the cyclist has exacerbated the conflict by continuing to cycle level with the bus as the space becomes ever narrower. It doesn't really help our cause to provide media exposure to people who seem keen to escalate a driver's error in this way.

It's the driver's duty to overtake safely. The driver failed. That's the problem here.

Yes, I'd have taken evasive action earlier by slowing, but the point is that there should be no need to do so!

Joeinpoole wrote:

I thought I was alone in being unable to see "a close pass" in that video. The bus only began pulling back in when the front of it was well past the cyclist. At that point the bus was clearly the lead vehicle and it was the cyclist's responsibility to moderate his speed to avoid a collision.

Where the bloody hell in any road traffic guidance do you find this recommendation?

The duty is on the passing vehicle, solely.

According to you, cutting in is just fine.

jacknorell wrote:

Joeinpoole wrote:

I thought I was alone in being unable to see "a close pass" in that video. The bus only began pulling back in when the front of it was well past the cyclist. At that point the bus was clearly the lead vehicle and it was the cyclist's responsibility to moderate his speed to avoid a collision.

Where the bloody hell in any road traffic guidance do you find this recommendation?

The duty is on the passing vehicle, solely.

According to you, cutting in is just fine.

Yes, yes, yes. In the perfect world that you obviously inhabit nobody uses their mobile phones whilst driving ... and everybody obeys the speed limit ... and nobody makes minor misjudgements of the situation they find themselves in ... and *everything* is perfect really.

Unfortunately those aren't the roads that I drive on, where drivers *are* actually fallible, so therefore I *do* have to take allowance of that and moderate my own actions to take account of that.

There's no point in getting your knickers in a twist over that particular bus driver's minor infraction, when you have plenty of time to take avoiding action yourself. Just deal with it and ride on. Share the fucking road and stop being a cycling tosser who thinks you own the road and no other road user should *ever* cause you to apply your brakes.

Joeinpoole wrote:

Yes, yes, yes. In the perfect world that you obviously inhabit nobody uses their mobile phones whilst driving ... and everybody obeys the speed limit ... and nobody makes minor misjudgements of the situation they find themselves in ... and *everything* is perfect really.

Unfortunately those aren't the roads that I drive on, where drivers *are* actually fallible, so therefore I *do* have to take allowance of that and moderate my own actions to take account of that.

There's no point in getting your knickers in a twist over that particular bus driver's minor infraction, when you have plenty of time to take avoiding action yourself. Just deal with it and ride on. Share the fucking road and stop being a cycling tosser who thinks you own the road and no other road user should *ever* cause you to apply your brakes.

I think you may be trivialising the bad overtake by calling it a "minor infraction", I know no one is perfect but out of the first Rule I quoted, he ignored 2 out of three points, and on the second ignored at least 3. There's another Rule (167) which states amongst others: "DO NOT overtake where you might come into conflict with other road users. For example when you would force another road user to swerve or slow down".

By ignoring those rules, forcing an overtake for no gain, the driver was putting the cyclists's life at risk, I suppose sometimes close or bad overtakes get people's knickers in a twist due to the near death experience, whether real or perceived.

If you can't see that the bus driver was in the wrong, dangerously so, then I guess your mind is clearly made up already. And if you can accept that it was dangerous, you can then probably understand why the guy chased after the bus to try and make that point.

4ChordsNoNet has stated it was more the insult afterwards so I guess a lot of this is moot. But if you say that people are fallible and make mistakes (which I agree with), if someone points one out to you, maybe just hold your hands up and say sorry instead of insulting them?

Neil753 wrote:

And summing up from the "other side".

I don't think anyone should be judging this driver too harshly. Sometimes feelings run a little high. Sure, she made a mistake, but she's being confronted with an aggressive cyclist who she's apparently seen nearly killing some old guy, and we can see from the vid that the cyclist is riding without much skill (clipping the apex of a right hand bend without a safety check, a close pass of a pedestrian, failure to use brakes, etc), so it's likely that she's been watching his behaviour too. I'm not surprised she called him a knob, even though she shouldn't have done so.

The thing is, if people stumble across this forum, watch the video, and then read all these comments that condemn the bus driver whilst refusing to acknowledge any of the poor cycling, then it just makes cyclists out to be an arrogant bunch of (dare I say it) knobs.

Road.cc, if you're going to run these contentious stories, at least check the video carefully to see if the cyclist is committing just as many errors as the driver they're trying to vilify, because if they are then it doesn't place us in a very good light.

No matter how many errors a cyclist makes, there is no justification in endangering their life, that's the bottom line really. He could jump lights, ride on the pavement, weave through traffic etc, all bad riding and should be fined but it does not give anyone the right or excuse to pass them without being appropriately cautious.

The driver is a professional driver and should know how to overtake. Maybe they made a mistake (a dangerous one), but when confronted, they should have owned up to that mistake and not insulted the cyclist.

Joeinpoole wrote:

jacknorell wrote:

Joeinpoole wrote:

I thought I was alone in being unable to see "a close pass" in that video. The bus only began pulling back in when the front of it was well past the cyclist. At that point the bus was clearly the lead vehicle and it was the cyclist's responsibility to moderate his speed to avoid a collision.

Where the bloody hell in any road traffic guidance do you find this recommendation?

The duty is on the passing vehicle, solely.

According to you, cutting in is just fine.

Yes, yes, yes. In the perfect world that you obviously inhabit nobody uses their mobile phones whilst driving ... and everybody obeys the speed limit ... and nobody makes minor misjudgements of the situation they find themselves in ... and *everything* is perfect really.

Unfortunately those aren't the roads that I drive on, where drivers *are* actually fallible, so therefore I *do* have to take allowance of that and moderate my own actions to take account of that.

There's no point in getting your knickers in a twist over that particular bus driver's minor infraction, when you have plenty of time to take avoiding action yourself. Just deal with it and ride on. Share the fucking road and stop being a cycling tosser who thinks you own the road and no other road user should *ever* cause you to apply your brakes.

What a resoundingly stupid comment.

The point, that you clearly seem to be missing, is the overtake was unsafe, it should never have been made in the first instance.

By your logic you wouldn't mind at all if you got carved up on every round about or had the front of your car clipped by a driver making a "small infraction", maybe you wouldn't mind if your children got run over by a motorist that was driving a little bit too fast and couldn't stop, I guess you'd just "deal with it"?

Get your head out your arse.

Neil753 wrote:

but she's being confronted with an aggressive cyclist who she's apparently seen nearly killing some old guy,

And your evidence for this is...what, exactly?

Personally, in the absence of any other evidence, it sounds to me like the usual collective blame rubbish that too many motorists love so much. The guy could, with the same logic, shout back "what about the nearly 2000 people you killed last year!".

Neil753 wrote:

you force a bus to come to an emergency stop in a postion that could present a hazard to other road users.

This seems to be placing all the blame for the consequence of a crap overtake on the cyclist, not the driver, and it sounds dangerously close to 'might is right'.

If a similar overtake/pull in manoeuvre were performed with two cars/trucks/buses whatever I doubt many people would argue that the 'overtakee' had 'forced' the overtaker into an emergency stop.

That said, while being unwilling to be bullied out of the way is not necessarily a bad thing, you do need to know when to let it go.

Headline news,

And today, another bus driver was pulled dead from underneath a road bike after a cyclist in overtook the bus. Witnesses claim the bus was going too quickly for the cyclist to keep on so the cyclist ran the bus down whilst turning left. The driver family say he was a "lovely person, loved by everyone and will be much missed." Both police and bus companies say that the senseless killings for just a few seconds must stop.

In another part of the country, a car driver was killed in a hit and run involving a time trial bike. The time trail bike failled to stop at the scene and was last seen heading towards Wigan. This was in the same spot where Sir Bradley Wiggins pulled out of a garage forecourt on his road bike and ran over a Porsche. The Porsche driver still suffers from those injuries. Police are appealling for any witnesses. Traces of sky blue and black lycra were found at the scene. But they will not say if the two incidents are linked.

Meanwhile on the M25, there was a 15 bicycle pile up after one was seen swerving as it's rear tyre blew out. The road was closed for several hours as the ambulance trykes had difficulty reaching the scene and carbon fibre had to be cleared away. No serious injuries were reported but a cyclist was seen screaming about the smashed BMW that was on the back of his bike. Another was seen sobbing into his Rapha water bottle which had lost it's bottom. Footage of the crash, taken by cyclists on the opposite side slowing down to have look, is all over You Tube. Police say this dangerous a repeat the request that cyclists don't slow down if they are on the other side of such busy roads. Also anyone seen using a mobile phone whilst cycling will be dealt with.

Rule 168. Being overtaken. If a driver is trying to overtake you, maintain a steady course and speed, slowing down if necessary to let the vehicle pass. Never obstruct drivers who wish to pass.

How on earth did you find this item?

the apologies mean nothing if it's not from the individual that caused the problem

Correct. The driver would just say "I didn't apologise because there was nothing to apologise for", there would be no record and if someone else complained about the same driver it's likely the company would protect the driver by deliberately not linking the 2 incidents.

I'm as militant on close-passing as anyone here, and considerably more diligent than most in trying to reform the b*****d police. However, I wouldn't have bothered to submit this video because it was a slow pass.