Near miss of the day 28: Driver turns across cyclist at speed

Yorkshire wallet wrote:

It's only a matter of time before the actual alleged near-misser themselves sues a site like this for besmirching their good name. Given civil evidential limits are lower than criminal ones, it's quite possible.

Doesn't seem at all likely to me. There's no libel in posting video of someone's behaviour in an unequivocally public place, as far as I know.

And would any of these drivers want to draw even more attention to their behaviour, leading to an even more obvious web-footprint, complete with their name attached?

And libel actions cost quite a bit of money to bring. Seems an absurdly high risk to take in response to relatively obscure stories that don't even include their names or anything google-able.

Not sure about the 'near miss' series itself or what it's supposed to achieve. Starting to think the main thing it does is reveal how reluctant the police are to ever act on such cases...and thus demonstrate the futility of expecting legal enforcement to work as a means of making cycling more attractive.

Yorkshire wallet wrote:

It's only a matter of time before the actual alleged near-misser themselves sues a site like this for besmirching their good name. Given civil evidential limits are lower than criminal ones, it's quite possible.

How is posting a video of someone doing something libellous?  I imagine that the websites will be fairly careful with the article that accompanies the video.

Aurifer wrote:

I know the person who took the dashcam footage. She was quite concerned at the time about the disregard shown by the driver for the welfare of other road users, in this case primarily the cyclist rather than herself. Since it seemed to her to be unambiguously a case of inconsiderate driving she felt that submitting footage of it to "Operation Considerate" was an appropriate thing to do. 

 

Speaking personally, I'd be interested to know why the cyclist not reporting the incident is sufficient reason for not taking the matter further. It's unlikely the cyclist was able to take down the numberplate himself, and, even if he had been able to, he would surely have known that it would be his word against the driver's unless he had himself obtained video evidence of what happened, which his failure to come forward does in itself make very unlikely. 

 

A far more important point, I think, is that stipulating that the cyclist needed to have made a complaint himself for further action to be taken suggests a questionable logic in the fundamental rationale behind the initiative: are initiatives like "Operation Considerate" designed solely to give individuals on the receiving end of bad driving the opportunity to obtain some kind of personal redress if (and only if) they themselves want it, or are they designed to discourage bad driving in general for the benefit and safety of all road users? 

 

The driver's behaviour looks dangerous to me, and possibly he makes a habit of driving like that. A word in his ear by the right people, i.e. the police, might just save another road user in the future from actual harm, rather than a near miss.

Unfortunately in my experience the police will do anything rather than prosecute a driver who has endangered a cyclist and will invent any excuse to avoid their responsibilities. When you say the right people are the police for a word in the ear of a careless driver this is true in theory but in practice many officers share the same contempt of the criminal driver for the vulnerable cycling victim.