A cyclist in Western Australia has posted video to YouTube showing the terrifying moment that a driver who had almost forced him off the road got out of his car and wielded a knife at him.
The footage was uploaded to the video sharing site after the motorist involved, driving a 4×4, had been fined A$1,500 after the video was passed to police. The title shot is from the rider’s helmetcam while the main footage is shot from a camera mounted on his bike’s handlebars.
Shortly beforehand, he had made a very close pass on the cyclist at the approach to a roundabout, which resulted in the rider banging on the vehicle to make the driver aware he was there.
The driver then stopped his vehicle and stepped out into the road, brandishing a knife at him.
Understandably, the rider backed away.
It’s not clear whether the YouTube user, who goes by the name Search for YOUR REG, was the actual cyclist involved.
Last week, footage emerged of a motorist in north west London threatening a cyclist with a baseball bat after passing him and immediately turning left.
> Video: Driver cuts up cyclist – then threatens him with baseball bat
The driver in that incident backed down once he realised he was being filmed.
25 thoughts on “Video: Aussie road rage driver pulls knife on cyclist”
I don’t know which is more
I don’t know which is more outrageous – the driver’s homicidal actions, or the pathetic penalty he received for them.
Australia looks like a truly awful place to be a cyclist. Again.
Fine will actually hurt him.
Fine will actually hurt him. That’s about 750 quid. If it happened here he’d probably just get a caution and that’d be the end of it.
Pathetic how the legal system treats situations like this. Fine should be bigger with some of that fine going to the cyclist as comp, and the rest to the police to cover their costs in handling it.
unconstituted wrote:
Actually if it happened here as clearly as that it would be straight to jail. Sentencing guidelines are pretty clear.
bobinski wrote:
Actually if it happened here as clearly as that it would be straight to jail. Sentencing guidelines are pretty clear.
— unconstituted
You are evidently an optimist whose faith in the system has not yet been impaired.
If this happened in Leeds, it would take a lot of complaining to get the police to investigate it, then more pressure to get them to arrsest anyone, and then even more to get them to refer it to the CPS, who would ignore it.
Getting any sentence at all would be a major uphill struggle with every official at every stage in the process combining “nobody was inured” with “the victim was ONLY a cyclist”.
Viz. the baseball bat guy, where the cops stated that they had seen the video but were not investigating.
If I pulled a knife on a cop
If I pulled a knife on a cop or a judge I’d get jail time. Simple as.
HalfWheeler wrote:
Rumour has it, the driver *is* a cop hence the lenient sentence and no name.
RPK wrote:
And likely tasered or shot.
It was bad driving, then an
It was bad driving, then an unacceptable degree of anger from the driver, who was in the wrong. That should be punished, but then wielding a knife like that should lead to a prison sentence.
The fact that there is no consequence for these actions leads people to conclude (rightly) that it’s the wild west out there on the roads, and the most angry and violent person will win.
Driving a huge SUV, carrying
Driving a huge SUV, carrying a big knife with him with which he makes ninja moves. He is THE man!!!!
The fine is indeed silly. But they have the Crocodile Dundee there (you know “That’s not a knife, this a knife”), so carrying tactical knives in Australia must be a manhood ritual.
Can’t you get a bigger fine
Can’t you get a bigger fine than that for not having a bell on your bike in Australia.
Maybe the answer is for WA
Maybe the answer is for WA cyclist to go full Mad Max…ditch the water bottle and carry a crowbar and let anyone that gets that close again pay for it in bodywork repairs.
Ok turning off the irony setting…what’s the answer? The law doesn’t protect us, having a cam which macho, SUV-driving f##kwit with a knife wasn’t bright enough to spot doesn’t protect us? I hear the PP comments and ack making sudden moves is a non-smart move – but NO-ONE is looking out for us except ourselves.
The fact that this prick thinks his crappy jeep is worth more than hospitalisation or potential death of another human being is the heart of this problem. #sadness
The driver should be prison
The driver should be in prison and banned from driving (and carrying a knife) for life.
The cyclist should really reconsider his technique for dealing with impatient motorists overtaking unsafely, which he himself describes as follows, “I was able to fend off most with a strong position and, if necessary, a slight sudden movement further out.” The “strong position” is fine, but the “sudden movement” is just a phenomenally bad idea. One of the reasons for riding well clear of the verge/kerb is so that you can hold a steady line and not have to swerve about to avoid most potholes and sunken drains. And in the video his last-second change of road position wasn’t so slight, in my opinion. It absolutely does not excuse any of the driver’s actions, but just in case anyone reading this thinks that is the way to ride safely: no, no, no, no, a thousand times no.
Just to reiterate, the driver is clearly a psychopath, the cyclist seems to be a slightly foolish man harming nobody except potentially himself, and any justice system that hands out merely a fine in a case such as this is a bad joke. But that’s just my opinion, I don’t want to start a pointless belligerent argument, I’m sure a certain someone will be along soon to do that.
actually thinking about it
actually thinking about it again – similar to the cretin that took a baseball bat to the lad in London earlier this week with far worse driving that this…take their cars. Take their cars and crush them with them watching then charge them for the disposal of the waste and make it clear that driving a ton of metal and plastic at 60kph is a privilege , not a right and one that is only afforded to people that dont exhibit psychotic behaviour.
boardmad wrote:
ah but the special snowflakes will plead hardship and a soft judge will believe their sob stories…
we have drivers still driving with ridiculous amounts of points on their licences… apparently driving is a ‘right’ these days, not a privilege… 🙁
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/britains-worst-driver-51-points-7134764
Scary but how cool are the
Scary but how cool are the details on the guy’s head cam.
The cowardly little shit-bag
The cowardly little shit-bag should have been jailed and his licence revoked for life. The public are not safe with that aggressive low-life being allowed to wander at large. He’s only capable of being a man when he’s got a weapon in his hand. He obviously doesn’t have the mental furniture to be in charge of a motor vehicle never mind a lethal weapon.
So what exactly was the
So what exactly was the driver fined for? Surely threatning behaviour with a weapon would attract much harsher penalty, right?
Luckily for the rider he has
Luckily for the rider he has the benefit of Australia’s compulsory helmet laws to keep him safe!
The attraction of Oz gets greater every week.
We really need one or more
We really need one or more cyclists with professional optical expertise to analyse the videos to support these victims with video evidence. This was a very close pass, much closer than it seems in the video, because of the optical characteristics of the cameras used.
I rather suspect that the Police are likely to lack the expertise in properly analysing video-camera footage because the footage appears deceptively similar ro what might have been seen with the naked eye. This is vitally important, because footage can be misused easily whether wilfully or incompetently to undermine a cyclist’s statement as being exaggerated.
It’s extremely difficult for someone who lacks proper training to assess exactly how close these vehicles approached, based upon such video footage. These cameras use ultra wide-angle / fish-eye lenses – to capture as much of the scene as possible and to ensure enormous depth of field (keeping everything in focus that is more than a short distance from the lens).
As an example, my Contour Roam2 HD Action Camera offers a 170 degree field of view – a fisheye lens.
The most crucial aspect to using cycling videos as evidence is that such lenses greatly exaggerate (distort) apparent perspective and when compared with the naked-eye, greatly increase the fall-off in angular size of objects as the object’s distance from the lens increases. There is at least one video on YouTube where a car hits the handlebar of a bicycle, but despite this the car looks close, but doesn’t look dangerously close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKNuX_4jGsc
A hint that such a lens is being used is when barrel distortion is seen (straight objects that cross the field of view, appear increasingly curved* towards the edge of the scene [*as long as they don’t pass through the lens’ optical axis / centre]).
This injustice needs to be addressed.
Mad Max indeed.
Mad Max indeed.
See you on the road, Skag!
I suppose what we never see
I suppose what we never see are the occassions a twat jumps out of his car, threatens a cyclist, and the said cyclist batters him – for obvious reasons, it’s just not the sort of thing that gets uploaded! It’s a shame really, because the message that’s being reinforced everytime a video like this appears is that cyclists are, by and large, a weedy bunch that are easily intimitaded.
Article wrote:
— ArticleWiggling a knife about is a bit arsey but, to be fair, no one likes being rermonsted at.
And his saddle was too low!
And his saddle was too low!
I thought Oz’s were ok but
I thought Oz’s were ok but turns out they are getting angrier at cyclists when driving.
When will this kind of road
When will this kind of road rage become as unacceptable as drunk driving is today? (& if you believe drunk driving’s still a problem, yes, you’re right but I can recall a time when being drunk was accepted as a mitigating circumstance following an accident!) It’s about time road rage became a serious offence in & of itself, even if there’s no subsequent injury/damage, with **very** long bans to keep such dangerous people off the road until they’re no longer threats.
In this case, one look at the car – the huge roo bars, all those spotlights – should be enough to alert anyone to the fact the driver’s a crazy & probably needs to be kept away from the rest of humanity until his testosterone levels stop interfering with his thought processes.