According to Transport for London, the city’s Quietways, the first of which opened last year and runs from Waterloo to Greenwich, “follow backstreet routes, through parks, along waterways or tree-lined streets,” and thereby “overcome barriers to cycling, targeting cyclists who want to use quieter, low-traffic routes, providing an environment for those cyclists who want to travel at a more gentle pace.”
The on-the-ground experience of riders can be rather different, however, as Mark Treasure of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain sets out in this blog post from last year while parts were still under construction, and in this post by The Ranty Highwayman a couple of months later.
The programme has also been criticised by London’s former cycling commissioner, Andrew Gilligan.
> Gilligan: Quietways programme is a failure
We’ve seen a couple of videos of near misses on the route – a month or two back, one did the rounds on social media of a black-cab driver turning across a rider – and here’s another one sent in by road.cc reader Henry Dalton shows.
It’s a classic SMIDSY – “Sorry mate, I didn’t see you” scenario as the driver pulls into a parking bay on the left then immediately swings right to perform a u-turn without having spotted Henry, who is almost knocked from his bike as he carries straight on towards a path that is bollarded off to bar access to motor vehicles.
Quite why the driver didn’t see Henry is unclear – but it’s possible from this, and other videos we’ve seen from this and other places where there is a through route for people on bikes that drivers can’t use that leads to an assumption that in effect they are in a cul-de-sac and simply aren’t aware that someone could be pedalling through.
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@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.
71 thoughts on “Near Miss of the Day 23: Featuring a U-turning SMIDSY driver”
Why didn’t the cyclist slow
Why didn’t the cyclist slow down in anticipation of something going pearshaped?
don simon wrote:
If the rider had shouted “Oy!” 5 seconds before, it would have avoided the near-miss.
harman_mogul wrote:
Five seconds before, the car was about 20-30 metres away and the windows were up. Seems unlikely that the driver would have heard them.
don simon wrote:
…with you on that; kind of obvious what was about to happen!
GarethWyn wrote:
Watch it again up to a second before the driver does the dangerous manouevre, and tell me how it is obvious that the driver is going to do it? He doesn’t indicate his intentions and there is nothing at all to show what he is going to do, so how is it obvious?
burtthebike wrote:
It does look like the driver has his hazzard lights on…..
ClubSmed wrote:
Not sure he does. Difficult to be certain. There’s certainly lights – brake lights though.
Of more concern is the amount of time I’ve spent on this thread discussing the ins-and-outs of a pig’s arse – and to little effect. Some just don’t want to listen to other opinions.
At least the weekend’s nearly here so, off the forum, and I’m going out for a ride. Who’s coming?
simonmb wrote:
…too fucking right.
ClubSmed wrote:
Extremely unlikely that those were hazard lights they were brake lights. Even if they were hazard lights, how does that show that they were about to do a u-turn? Last time I checked hazard warning lights were for warning about hazards when stationary, not for indicating an illegal manouvre.
don simon wrote:
The driver was pulling into a parking space and it is therefore a reasonable assumption that they were going to park, and impossible to guess that the driver was going to pull out without looking. Why didn’t the driver look before carrying out his manouevre, as required in law?
don simon wrote:
Thats easy: they didn’t slow down because they didn’t imagine that someone would be so f-ing stupid as to make that manoeuvre without checking that the road was clear.
I cycle this route every day,
I cycle this route every day, this area of Q1 is terribly designed, most of the roads that feed it don’t even have give way lines! However, I find most of the rest of the route really good, as long as the few drivers who are on it pay attention…
Not that obvious – it may
Not that obvious – it may seem obvious now with hindsight… and was it really the cyclists responsibility to make the car aware of its presence, or the drivers responsibility to look?
Yes, self preservation means we should all look after ourselves, but lets not allow our self preservation methods remove responsibility from those who have been awarded a licence to demonstrate that they have been trained and deemed competent to drive on the roads.
We, as cyclists need to stop victim blaming, and stop accepting pathetic levels of driver awareness / competence / care.
Jimmy Ray Will wrote:
Who’s victim blaming in this one? You’re putting an awful lot in there to defend something that no one’s said.
I think it’s pretty fair to anticipate that the muppet driver was likely to swing back out into the road, Either way I’d have been a tad more cautious and prepared to stop. No, it wasn’t the responsibility for the cyclist to do anything, just a good idea. A shout, slow down or taking a different line would all have .
In a different argument we’d be saying that the following road user has a responsibility not to run into the vehicle in front.
I totally agree that the driver should have looked, but as a road user I also assume that they haven’t and that applies to when I am cycling, driving or walking.
But trying to claim that the cyclist shouldn’t take some of the reponsibility is wrong, pure and simple.
don simon wrote:
It’s the weight of that responsibility that makes this a debate, isn’t it.
Person on bike has some responsibility not just to plough on regardless.
Person in 1-ton metal thing has some responsibility not to just do a 180 with their fucking gormless eyes closed.
So in that equation, I’ll start the bidding at 90% driver, 10% cyclist.
And not wanting to put words in JRW’s mouth/comments box, I think that was his point. The comments on here do not reflect the weighting of error on the tit of a driver just driving their wallymobile wherever they like without checking properly, pausing or any discernible signals. The comments on here have focused on the relatively minor contribution on the part of the cyclist.
Combine that with the likelihood of who comes out of this encounter with injuries, were it a tad closer, and I don’t think that’s a million miles away from the definition of ‘victim blaming’.
davel wrote:
Also the point is that we can all rest-assured that physics will ensure that on average the cyclist gets punished for their share of ‘responsibility’. No need for posters to trouble themselves trying to do physics’s job for it. It’s the motorist’s part that requires more external intervention.
FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:
But trying to claim that the cyclist shouldn’t take some of the reponsibility is wrong, pure and simple.
— FluffyKittenofTindalos It’s the weight of that responsibility that makes this a debate, isn’t it. Person on bike has some responsibility not just to plough on regardless. Person in 1-ton metal thing has some responsibility not to just do a 180 with their fucking gormless eyes closed. So in that equation, I’ll start the bidding at 90% driver, 10% cyclist. And not wanting to put words in JRW’s mouth/comments box, I think that was his point. The comments on here do not reflect the weighting of error on the tit of a driver just driving their wallymobile wherever they like without checking properly, pausing or any discernible signals. The comments on here have focused on the relatively minor contribution on the part of the cyclist.— davel Also the point is that we can all rest-assured that physics will ensure that on average the cyclist gets punished for their share of ‘responsibility’. No need for posters to trouble themselves trying to do physics’s job for it. It’s the motorist’s part that requires more external intervention.— don simon
@FluffyKitten – you’re misunderstanding the meaning of the word ‘responsibility’. The responsibility is to see a situation building and avoid it. That’s all. There’s no sliding-scale of consequences that relates to this. There’s no reason for us to believe that we’ll ever share the level of risk we do when we are motorists. Shared responsibility – but as cyclists we understand if things go horribly wrong it’ll be us that come off worse. Is this news to you?
simonmb wrote:
No. Nor is it news to me that some cyclists seem to think it’s really important for them to talk about the ‘responsibility’ of the cyclist, whenever something like this happens. I just wonder why they do that. Can you explain why?
FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:
But trying to claim that the cyclist shouldn’t take some of the reponsibility is wrong, pure and simple.
— FluffyKittenofTindalos It’s the weight of that responsibility that makes this a debate, isn’t it. Person on bike has some responsibility not just to plough on regardless. Person in 1-ton metal thing has some responsibility not to just do a 180 with their fucking gormless eyes closed. So in that equation, I’ll start the bidding at 90% driver, 10% cyclist. And not wanting to put words in JRW’s mouth/comments box, I think that was his point. The comments on here do not reflect the weighting of error on the tit of a driver just driving their wallymobile wherever they like without checking properly, pausing or any discernible signals. The comments on here have focused on the relatively minor contribution on the part of the cyclist.— simonmb Also the point is that we can all rest-assured that physics will ensure that on average the cyclist gets punished for their share of ‘responsibility’. No need for posters to trouble themselves trying to do physics’s job for it. It’s the motorist’s part that requires more external intervention.— FluffyKittenofTindalos
@FluffyKitten – you’re misunderstanding the meaning of the word ‘responsibility’. The responsibility is to see a situation building and avoid it. That’s all. There’s no sliding-scale of consequences that relates to this. There’s no reason for us to believe that we’ll ever share the level of risk we do when we are motorists. Shared responsibility – but as cyclists we understand if things go horribly wrong it’ll be us that come off worse. Is this news to you?
— davel No. Nor is it news to me that some cyclists seem to think it’s really important for them to talk about the ‘responsibility’ of the cyclist, whenever something like this happens. I just wonder why they do that. Can you explain why?— don simon
Okay. Forget the responsibility of a cyclist. I take responsibility for everything I do. I press the button at a pedestrian crossing – but still look both ways even when I know the green man is inviting me to cross. I drive my car at an appropriate speed for the conditions rather than at the maximum allowed by the law. This sort of thing. Responsibility isn’t a word only used ‘whenever something like this happens’, it’s something we all, as ‘responsible’ humans, should be aware of. Ride without responsibility and it’ll be you whose death we will be lamenting here one day.
simonmb wrote:
@FluffyKitten – you’re misunderstanding the meaning of the word ‘responsibility’. The responsibility is to see a situation building and avoid it. That’s all. There’s no sliding-scale of consequences that relates to this. There’s no reason for us to believe that we’ll ever share the level of risk we do when we are motorists. Shared responsibility – but as cyclists we understand if things go horribly wrong it’ll be us that come off worse. Is this news to you?
— FluffyKittenofTindalos No. Nor is it news to me that some cyclists seem to think it’s really important for them to talk about the ‘responsibility’ of the cyclist, whenever something like this happens. I just wonder why they do that. Can you explain why?— davel
Okay. Forget the responsibility of a cyclist. I take responsibility for everything I do. I press the button at a pedestrian crossing – but still look both ways even when I know the green man is inviting me to cross. I drive my car at an appropriate speed for the conditions rather than at the maximum allowed by the law. This sort of thing. Responsibility isn’t a word only used ‘whenever something like this happens’, it’s something we all, as ‘responsible’ humans, should be aware of. Ride without responsibility and it’ll be you whose death we will be lamenting here one day.— don simon
That’s not even an argument in this situation, because the driver was clearly taking less responsibility by dicking about all over the road in their car.
I’m not arguing to not hold back, not scrub some speed, make your presence known etc.
But I’m absolutely arguing that if you make one post to that effect, for this scenario, you should be making nine to the effect that that driver is a selfish or incompetent prick who needs to treat driving as a privilege, not a right.
This series of ‘Near Miss of
This series of ‘Near Miss of the Day’ you’re running seems to turn out some very desperate examples of where the rider should be more aware of the situation. If he’d been driving a car there’s no way he’d have continued without moderating his speed in anticpation of what might happen. As cyclists, we’re perhaps all too often guilty of thinking “I’m skilled enough to squeeze through there” without consideration for the other roaduser. To be fair to the driver – admittedly he appears dangerously unobservant himself – it wasn’t necessary for him to have a bike shoot past him as close as that as he executed his turn. Sharing the roads mean sharing the responsibility. Surely?
simonmb wrote:
And sharing the consequences? So whenever a cyclist gets injured the driver should be hit with a hammer? Or does the ‘sharing’ only go one-way?
The cyclist avoided a hit, so as far as he’s concerned it’s job done. All that remains is another example of how motorists habitually fail to look properly, and so should be kept away from cyclists and pedestrians.
FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:
— FluffyKittenofTindalos And sharing the consequences? So whenever a cyclist gets injured the driver should be hit with a hammer? Or does the ‘sharing’ only go one-way? The cyclist avoided a hit, so as far as he’s concerned it’s job done. All that remains is another example of how motorists habitually fail to look properly, and so should be kept away from cyclists and pedestrians.— simonmb
There were no consequences here. In this intance the cyclist clearly pushed on and squeezed through a shrinking space. He was the only one of the two involved that was aware of the building situation. The motorist should have been aware but wasn’t. If there had been a collision it would have been as much ‘bike hits car’ as ‘car hits bike’.
Level of responsibility is
Level of responsibility is not measured by using level of damage or vulnerability.
As for victim blaming, there wasn’t a fucking victim! No one got hurt, not even touched or skimmed. I’ve had people look at me with more aggression than that maneouvre!!
No looking, no indicating.
No looking, no indicating. But you lot want to blame the cyclist for failing to stop, even though the moton gave no indication of his cretinous plan. Should we just all stop whenever a driver turns into a parking place, on the off chance he’ll use it to do a completely unadvertised uturn?
oldstrath wrote:
Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, read the road and make decisions. Why does everything have to be in the extreme?
Have a read of this to see who should look and who should signal and who should take avoiding action.
http://road.cc/content/forum/226092-close-passing-applies-us-too
FFS!
oldstrath wrote:
Thanks for saying that and saving me the trouble.
Driver makes a completely unpredictable manouevre without looking but many people here are blaming the cyclist. Why? The driver had an absolute duty to look, but he didn’t. The cyclist had no duty to do other than what he did, carry on riding along his right of way. If there had been a collision I would have expected the driver to have been found 100% responsible.
There seems to be a mentality which just accepts bad driving as inevitable: it isn’t. We all need to be accountable for our actions, and the more power you have, the more responsibility too. This driver was irresponsible to an illegal degree and we should all be condemning them, not absolving them.
Quote:
Applauds.
For those of a certain age, I’m always reminded of The Brittas Empire where Gordon Brittas is run over on a zebra crossing, he is heard saying “…But it was my right of way…”
Go figure.
The vast majority would say that if a road user can’t stop safely, then they are circulating too quickly.
don simon wrote:
Applauds.
For those of a certain age, I’m always reminded of The Brittas Empire where Gordon Brittas is run over on a zebra crossing, he is heard saying “…But it was my right of way…”
Go figure.
The vast majority would say that if a road user can’t stop safely, then they are circulating too quickly.
Why are you also making it binary when even those (incl me) saying it’s MORE the responsibility of the driver are mostly not saying the cyclist doesn’t have ANY responsibility.
Re: your point about vulnerability – fair point. But in a civilised society where people operating heavy machinery have to get licensed to use it as transport, you’d kind of hope that that added burden of responsibility brought with it some additional sense to then not drive it all over the fucking road without looking for others who might not be in metal cages.
don simon wrote:
Applauds.
For those of a certain age, I’m always reminded of The Brittas Empire where Gordon Brittas is run over on a zebra crossing, he is heard saying “…But it was my right of way…”
Go figure.
The vast majority would say that if a road user can’t stop safely, then they are circulating too quickly.
Except that if the pedestrian is crossing on a zebra crossing, it *is* their right of way once they step out! Anyway, most people don’t have the time to wait for a driver to politely stop and let them across (clue: it would never happen).
I’m with Don Simon on this.
I’m with Don Simon on this. It’s no use being right but dead.
harman_mogul wrote:
Right. How about right and not dead, like the cyclist in the video?
It’s a bit less snappy, granted, but it’s a metric fucktonne more accurate.
Quote:
Poor English is always going to be poor English. I am glad that we agree (I think). How the hell do you get that I’m making it binary?EDIT: Especially as I think both perties have fault; the driver made a shit maneouver while the cyclist could have stopped in time to avoid a potential problem. Perhaps this is the problem in that we all pass responsibility on to others and expect them to get out of the bloody way.
don simon wrote:
Poor English is always going to be poor English. I am glad that we agree (I think). How the hell do you get that I’m making it binary?EDIT: Especially as I think both perties have fault; the driver made a shit maneouver while the cyclist could have stopped in time to avoid a potential problem. Perhaps this is the problem in that we all pass responsibility on to others and expect them to get out of the bloody way.
This.
Yeah I think we’re all
Yeah I think we’re all somewhere in the middle-ish.
The bit that I’m arguing about is that you both jumped on the cyclist. And that’s fair enough – to a point. I’m arguing for fair weighting, and against this dig at cyclists’ mistakes while the metal elephant in the room is being driven all over the road. Neither of you have given anything like the same attention to the berk in control of the car.
And a dig at poor English, really? Yours isn’t exactly perfect on this page, either. I assume we’re both bashing this out on a phone while battling autocomplete/autocorrect and trying to do three other things: try to keep the argument on point, at least.
davel wrote:
Again words are being put in mouths. Just because I started by saying that the cyclist could’ve slowed down, doesn’t mean that I don’t think that the driver hadn’t made a mistake.
Happy for you to correct my English too, just show me the errors, but I genuinely struggled to make sense of what you were saying.
don simon wrote:
Again words are being put in mouths. Just because I started by saying that the cyclist could’ve slowed down, doesn’t mean that I don’t think that the driver hadn’t made a mistake.
Happy for you to correct my English too, just show me the errors, but I genuinely struggled to make sense of what you were saying.— davel
The funny thing about comments on Web pages is that they only record the words that you type into them. They don’t really register your ‘thoughts’ or ‘sentiment’ unless you shove the appropriate words in them. Neither I, nor the Web page, is going to infer the apportion of blame that you actually meant unless you type what it is that you actually mean.
And really – have a look at your spellings in previous posts. Mistakes happen. You can make your point without strikethrough sarcasm, but if you’re going to pull people up on English, try doing things like spelling parties, responsibility and manoeuvre correctly.
If you swap a motorist for
If you swap a motorist for the cyclist, they would have slowed down and tried to ascertain what the car was about to do. Any rational person would. The cyclist is a fucking moron living in a bubble.
How is this even a near miss?
How is this even a near miss? It was obvious what the motorist was going to do (yes, they’ve clearly forgotten MSM, but so have 90% of motorists you see on the roads); the cyclist clearly knew too and decided to speed up and go for the gap. Plenty of us would have.
No collision, no victim, nothing to blame on anyone.
This series of clickbait articles is getting very tedious.
I’m not sure about the
I’m not sure about the articles.
On the one hand, I agree with much of the criticism along the lines of them being clickbait /pointless.
On the other, I’m behind *any* campaigning that draws attention to shit driving.
Given that the alternative seems to be a lack of campaigning/raising awareness – or worse: shrugging your shoulders and saying ‘I get worse than that on a daily basis’, and possibly *tolerating* shit driving as the norm, I see it as part of the overall noise being made in an attempt to make us safer on the roads. I’m a bit concerned that if we/cyclists stop making these different noises, nobody else will make them for ‘us’. That’s why I think the posts on here jumping on the cyclist behaviour first are arse-about-tit: there are loads more sites where you can go and bitch about cyclist behaviour. It’s a bit depressing when it happens on a cycling site in response to a video where the driver’s behaviour is worse.
So I might not agree with the type of ‘campaign’, but I’m right behind the principle.
davel wrote:
… and shit cycling too? We can’t call out motorists if we’re not prepared to objectively assess cyclist’s performances.
simonmb wrote:
… and shit cycling too? We can’t call out motorists if we’re not prepared to objectively assess cyclist’s performances.— davel
Absolutely – I’m just calling for proportion/perspective. I only piped up when I saw the first posts castigating the cyclist, when I think their errors were way less significant than the driver’s.
This isn’t black and white: cycling (and driving) is based on a set of assumptions and risk calculations – and they’re based on perception of risk more than actual risk. Many people don’t even get on a bike on the road because they think it’s too risky (I *think* I read a survey that suggested more people don’t cycle because of perception of danger, than actually cycle regularly). This morning I made an assumption (and risk calculation) that I wouldn’t be rear-ended on the way into work. If you’ve ever taken primary or filtered, again, you’ve made the risk-based assumption that other drivers won’t just do exactly what this driver did and drive over the road without looking or indicating. That might fit your risk appetite but don’t assume that everyone has the same one: some people won’t take primary and won’t filter and, to labour the point, millions of people won’t even get on their bike to commute etc because their risk threshold is set way lower. They think your self preservation is haywire because you get on a bike regularly. Millions of them can’t be wrong, right?
The cyclist might have been a bit keen to nick the gap or to make the point, but he rides in London: you mix with a mass of humanity on foot, on bikes and in cars. If you assumed that each person you encountered was about to do something stupid or unpredictable, you’d be permanently hanging back behind everyone else and wouldn’t get anywhere. If he’s a daily commuter he probably has a relatively high risk threshold – I’m not sure I would commute daily there.
So he maybe made a daft assumption (while actually just riding his bike at an acceptable speed, in a predictable manner). Nothing too outlandish, and I wouldn’t call it ‘shit’ riding. You’re judging him by your own risk appetite and, given he wasn’t hit, who was actually right?
Pulling off the road, doing a u-ey straight back round onto a quietway, and apparently not checking – yeah, for me, that is pretty shit driving. I’d sooner castigate the driver for creating the situation, than the cyclist for exploiting it somehow.
Quote:
I’m sure that you’d fully agree that if the cyclist had dabbed the breaks, we wouldn’t even have a video to be debating. That’s how week this supposed close pass is.
😉
don simon wrote:
I’m sure that you’d fully agree that if the cyclist had dabbed the breaks, we wouldn’t even have a video to be debating. That’s how week this supposed close pass is.
😉
So you are saying if a driver goes through a red light and collides with someone on green then it is appropriate to blame the victim for not anticipating the manoeuvre. After all the victim could have dabbed the brakes and so avoided any debate.
Fifth Gear wrote:
No, he’s saying that the car’s body language was more suggestive of a U-turn than a parking manoeuvre. There’s no incident here AFAICS, so no blame to apportion.
If you want to be pedantic, a green light signals “go if the way is clear”, not “go regardless of the circumstances”. Both on the bike and in a car, anticipating a RLJ from another bike or car has saved my skin on numerous occasions. You can’t play the blame game when you’re dead.
srchar wrote:
You are wrong to say there is no incident. Careless driving is still an offence even if a collision did not occur. Inanimate objects like cars do not have body language. It’s easy for you to interpret the intention of the driver with hindsight. We can all do that, but since we are not all mind readers the rest of us have the Highway Code and the law to inform us rather than your subjective opinion.
It’s great that you are a mind reader and don’t have to play the blame game. Good luck with that while it lasts.
Fifth Gear wrote:
The car was moving, the wheels rolling and turning right, the brake lights went on and then off. It’s not hard to work out what the car was doing. Or perhaps it is, which would explain a lot. What it wasn’t is parked.
The driver was at fault and the cyclist had his own fair share of fault, and luckily no one was hurt.
Are you seriously arguing about the “body language” of a car? 🙂
Fifth Gear wrote:
Of course they do. The direction the wheels are pointing in, the suspension loading and roll in turns, the attitude of the car under braking or acceleration – these are the car’s body language. I appreciate it is not a widely-used term outside of motorsport, but that’s how you anticipate the movement of a car on the track without indicators or brake lights.
You should learn to read cars in this way, it will keep you safer on the roads.
srchar wrote:
Thanks for your advice but I definitely don’t need it from you. Where did you get your crystal ball?
Fifth Gear wrote:
Don’t take this as a personal insult. In the whole history of this miserable little clickbait series this is without doubt the best piece of advice on situational awareness.
Fifth Gear wrote:
I ride 40km daily in heavy London traffic; circuit racing is a hobby of mine. I know that it is possible to read a car to anticipate what its driver will do next. Likewise for cyclists. If you can’t do that and don’t want to learn, it’s your loss.
srchar wrote:
All good advice, none of which would be needed if the loon in the car weren’t too blind or thick to see what was behind him and too idle to use the indicator switch. The other lesson I take from this is to equip my bike with the brightest strobe I can buy, an airzound, and a couple of throwing axes.
[/quote]
[/quote]
All good advice, none of which would be needed if the loon in the car weren’t too blind or thick to see what was behind him and too idle to use the indicator switch. The other lesson I take from this is to equip my bike with the brightest strobe I can buy, an airzound, and a couple of throwing axes.
[/quote]
Throwing axes? I was thinking more along the lines of a couple of RPGs.
Quietways are sacred.
Quietways are sacred.
Thanks for the comments guys.
Thanks for the comments guys. There are too many to respond to in detail.
Just a few points to make
1) I have ridden this route for a number of years at similar speed without incident
2) I originally thought that when the driver moved to the left he was intending to park.
3) There was another cyclist immediately behind me who shouted at the driver
( you may be able to hear him in the footage ) – so this was a near miss for 2 cyclists not just one.
4) This is now being investigated by the Met Police.
5) For those of you who live in London, statements about bad driving can be e-mailed to the
Met Police ( a few lines saying what happened, when and where ) and you can attach
a link to YouTube footage. Contact Liz Ross at Liz.Ross@met.pnn.police.uk to get a standard
statement form.
Henry Dalton wrote:
1) Not sure this is relevant unless a car happens to be turning in front of you in exactly the same circumstances.
2) Poor awareness on your part, its very clear from his positioning that he isn’t parking.
3) The fact that two cyclists showed poor awareness doesn’t make it any less poor.
4) The police will do absolutely nothing, as they should.
luiandlui wrote:
Hello, Willo. It’s been a while…
And old trick I was taught
And old trick I was taught when riding a motorbike was to watch the car’s wheels.
1. They stay on full lock.
2. They didn’t stop moving/rolling.
3. It looks like the brake lights come off while the vehicle is still moving.
The car did nothing to indicate that it was parking, in my most humble of opinions.
I think you’ve now learnt that it doesn’t matter how many times you have been able to do something, it is no indicator of the future.
I’m glad you didn’t sustain any serious imjuries in this near miss.
don simon wrote:
4. They’re driving perpendiculart to the parking bays.
To cement my position… I am
To cement my position… I am not saying cyclists don’t have a responsbility to look after themselves, and I am sure we all do.
I also believe we have a responsbility to not succumb to the motor industry and blame ourselves whenever the standard of driving falls well below the necessary.
In this case, the driver was clearly wrong. they moved without signalling or looking. Two failures, right there. This is indisputable, tghe driver was at fault… not the cyclist.
The cyclist could. and arguably should. have preempted the car drivers actions and taken more obvious preventative measures.
For me, as stated, our focus should be calling out the driver for their piss poor driving, whilst maybe highlighting how the cyclist could have moved to the right and maybe moderated speed, just in case.
I think the analogy of the pedestrian crossing mentioned is actually apt here. If you step out onto a pedestrian crossing whilst a car approaches you at 30mph, making no effort to slow… then you are an idiot. The driver is still wrong however.
However, in this instance, I believe the situation was more akin to a pelican crossing, with the green man on display. The approaching car is notably slowed, but not quite fully stopped. Do you wait to see if the car decides to accelerate through the light, or do you start walking?
We can all fully mitigate against all situations all the time, however as already alluded to, the only natural conlusion to this approach will be not riding your bike… so we all evaluate risk to a level.
What needs to happen, whilst we remain alert, is that bad driving is called out as such, not simply accepted, and mitigated against by those more vulnerable.
It’s too short of a clip for
It’s too short of a clip for me to be sure, but it does seem like the car may have it’s hazzard lights on indicating that it is about to perform a manouvre that other road users need to be wary of?
ClubSmed wrote:
They weren’t hazard lights, they were brake lights, and if they were hazards, they would have been being used illegally. What idiot would use hazard lights to show that they were doing a u-turn? Possibly the same kind of idiot who does a u-turn without looking I suppose.
“Never use them as an excuse for dangerous or illegal parking. You MUST NOT use hazard warning lights while driving or being towed unless you are on a motorway or unrestricted dual carriageway and you need to warn drivers behind you of a hazard or obstruction ahead.” Highway code.
Thanks for the comments guys.
Thanks for the comments guys. I will bear them in mind.
Hindsight is a great thing.
Fortunately neither I nor the cyclist behind me were hit.
Let’s wait and see what the police do.
I think we need our own
I think we need our own Godwin, that kicks in when something along the lines of ‘no use being right and dead’ is posted.
Or then again, who do I think I am, trying to impose laws like some mid-war fascist dictator……
It’s not bad advice, but the
It’s not bad advice, but the criticism of cyclists for doing anything less than text-book in these situations is laughable (isn’t aimed at srchar – I know he’s a London commuter and not one of these usual ‘first responders’).
Whenever these videos are posted, there’s a set of ‘oooh, you don’t wanna do that’ commenters that point out any imperfections that they think they can spot in the riding. Do they ever commute on a bike? Filter in traffic? Because if they do, they sure as shit don’t always do it perfectly or accurately measure every risk.
Meanwhile, while they’re clogging up cyberspace with those inane observations designed purely to make themselves feel better, the person wanging a ton of metal threateningly across the road gets nothing more than an acceptance of twatty driving, a ‘yeah, the driver could have done this, BUT enough of that – here’ s a list of what the silly cyclist didn’t do….’.
Also, I’m slightly skeptical regarding how much watching pitch and tilt of cars driven by relatively serious drivers doing 100mph+ on track days applies to watching wallies who are liable to do anything with zero notice at 20mph in barely legal contraptions on a commute in London. But as a general point I think it’s fair.
davel wrote:
You don’t half talk some crap, davel.
Yes, it us very much a post
Yes, it is very much a post match analysis by armchair pundits who were were not on the pitch and who have the benefit of hindsight and multiple replays.
The “ohh, you didn’t want to do that” comments are annoying. But take the ego of personal critiscism out of the equation and the technicalities of who was right and who was wrong, and what is left is often a little nugget of roadcraft that is worth picking up.
Over the years I have benefitted from driver and rider training by some highly experienced instructors. The nuances of roadcraft, particularly the body language of other vehicles was something they all picked up on. Another common thread is that no matter how good you think you are you, if you learn nothing new from every single journey, then you have almost certainly missed something. For many, just using a vehicle to get from A to B without crashing is enough. For cyclists, we have more to loose if things go wrong, so I really do believe that we have a vested interest in aspiring to improve our situational awareness skills. Strip away all the hi viz, protective helmets, blinky lights. The most critical element to our personal safety that we actually have control over is simply (and rather tritely) not being in the wrong place at the wrong time and you can shift the odds in your favour.
Thanks to the OP for sharing the video and taking the flack that they may not have been expecting.
Mungecrundle wrote:
Spot on.
Run along, Don: the grown-ups who actually ride bikes are talking.
Likewise, petal.
Likewise, petal.
dinosaurJR had you pegged.
davel wrote:
I hope he’s OK after his public meltdown.
It was so bleeding obvious
It was so bleeding obvious what the driver of the car was going to do, it was mentioned in one of the first telegrams sent by Marconi across the Atlantic.
Do some of the responders on here actually ride bicycles or are just trolls ?