One curious subset of submissions to our Near Miss of the Day series is the number that involve the driver of a horsebox making a close pass on a cyclist – and here’s another one to add to the collection, filmed near the Oxfordshire town of Henley-on-Thames.
Curious because, of course, if the person driving the horsebox were in the saddle rather than behind the wheel, he or she would rightly expect, as a vulnerable road user, that motorists would afford more courtesy than is shown here and give a wider berth.
BucksCycleCammer, the road.cc user who filmed the close pass, said that it happened “approaching a junction and a blind right-hand bend at 30mph.
“I have to hope that there were no horses in the back, as I’m sure they wouldn’t have been appreciating the erratic driving.
“On 22nd Oct I was initially informed that the driver would be offered a course. However, today (17th Nov) I was told that he’d jumped the gun assuming this was the case, and instead the decision maker had instead selected a formal warning.
“He also noted that the driver had watched the footage and ‘In her correspondence to the Police she raised concerns about the boasting nature of your YouTube site’.
“I did point out that in my opinion, and that of many others, if motorists are unhappy with the standard of their driving being publicised then it is entirely within their control not to put cyclists in danger to start with,” he added.
> 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@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.
> What to do if you capture a near miss or close pass (or worse) on camera while cycling
72 thoughts on “Near Miss of the Day 661: Horsebox driver makes close pass”
Terrible driving.
Terrible driving.
Horsey set though. Give far more consideration to their four-legged friends than any cyclist.
Both overtakes were poor, especially the first into a right hand bend and one has to surmise that the driver knew exactly what they were doing throughout both awful manouveurs.
I was particularly impressed
I was particularly impressed where they nearly took out the following cyclist, as they tried to squeeze into the gap behind the leading cyclist. I mean – had they not noticed that there were two cyclists?
brooksby wrote:
How could they possible see them, when they’re dressed in black with no lights…
Is it that these people drive
Is it that these people drive their van infrequently and have forgotten that it’s a bit bigger than the SUV they drove to pick up the van to pick up the horses to drive to wherever they do what they do and then drive back to drop off the horses and then drive to drop off the van and get back into the SUV to go home?
Guardians of the countryside, these people.
Disappointing lack of action
Disappointing lack of action by the police here – in my opinion the horsebox driver should have received more than a warning.
That notwithstanding, there are two mitigating points in favour of the driver. First, as can be seen from the speed reading, the cyclist accelerated into the overtake making it far more difficult than it should have been. This feeds onto point number two, which is the incident may in some way have been confected to titillate a YouTube audience, rather than have been a genuine piece of bad driving. This probably weighed on the mind of the police decision maker in coming to their judgement.
I shouldn’t rise to the
I shouldn’t rise to the obvious trolling but simply put, fuck off you dickhead.
S13SFC wrote:
^what he said.
Well said!
Well said!
I’d suggest he gets banned for those comments, but he’ll just float back to the top, like the scum he is.
Your eagle eyes did not spot
Your eagle eyes did not spot the brake check and failed left brake light though?
I watched the video very
I watched the video very closely – my take on it was that the cyclist with the camera was much wider than the leaner cyclist ahead of him, and that the horsebox driver simply couldn’t see past him to the rider infront due to his increased girth.
My rationale for this is that the cyclist with the camera was riding with wider tyres (28mm or 30mm) and was also catching up quickly on the downhill section – his increased weight would be a natural advantage on the decent.
Garage at Large wrote:
joe9090 wrote:
I wasn’t sure about that brake light: I’d thought it was light refecting and that neither brake light was working…
Risible. You’re self
Risible. You’re self-parodying now.
quiff wrote:
I’ve wondered for a long time if I’ve just failed to detect mediocre satire.
Garage at Large wrote:
And that’s where yo could have ended, instead of trying to torment.
The RPM tells a different story. Most likely a local connection, it is more likely to be reliable than the speed which, since it tends to remain steady then shifted up slightly when the van was very close alongside (and the RPM was going down), was more likely to be GPS-based and vulnerable to averaging delay, and possibly interference both from the van and the surrounding environment.
Which we can dismiss, because:
The cyclist was pedalling at
The cyclist was pedalling at around 90rpm pretty much until the horsebox driver had finished the overtake. If you look at the rider in front, by contrast, they were coasting pretty much the whole time.
Garage at Large wrote:
Quite so. Which is why I was catching him up, until I was blocked off by the horsebox, and – once the horsebox had got out of my way – is why I then overtook him. Were you really after a physics lesson, or did you have another point to make?
Well he was initially
Well he was initially indicating you were a fat bloke and blocking the view to the other cyclist. And his reasoning for that is because you were going faster downhill. Now he has decided you were pedalling too fast so deserved it…… Make of the troll what you will, but don’t expect any apologies. Afterall, you only got close passed to get more viewers on youtube. (Next he will be telling you off for whispering “effs sake” and you deserved it).
Demanding that fellow
Demanding that fellow cyclists ride respectfully isn’t a trollish or leftfield idea, it’s completely mainstream and accepted outside this odd echo-chamber.
Take Mara Abbott, possibly the second best US female cyclist I’ve seen (Chloé Dygert is the best), and she’s categorical: Disrespectful cyclists endanger the whole cycling community.
If I can change attitudes and convince even one cyclist to reform their behaviour for the better, it’s a win as far as I’m concerned.
On the video submitter, I already stated that I thought the driver should have got a bigger punishment than a warning, but nonetheless there are learning points that the cyclist could take onboard:
Garage at Large wrote:
Unless you’re being followed by a righthand drive vehicle in a country where we drive on the left, in which case the driver will have line of sight of all cyclists and your size won’t matter a damn;
See the video above for an absolutely textbook example of this, where the rider has a cadence of 93 rpm as the overtake begins and has slowed to 28 rpm as the rear of the vehicle passes.
I suspect Boo needs to
I suspect Boo needs to apologise to Bucks Cycle Cammer for essentially stating he is the size of a small van when he seems to be a reasonably fit and fast cyclist. Of course, like with anything from him, any apology, if it comes will be will be mealy mouthed and with an extra caveat of some stupid extra trolling.
And as for the RPM, from an earlier reply, apparently the vehicle being shown on both front and rear facing cameras at the same time is actually a fully successive overtake. Bucks stopped pedalling within 1 second of the vehicle appearing on the front camera, so did exactly what Boo indicated, yet he was still to blame apparently.
Rendel Harris wrote:
And we should all have TT bikes and ride in a TT postion. TT bikes, the safest on the road.
Oh bollix. Again. I and many
Oh bollix. Again. I and many other on the forum cycle within the HC guidelines. We don’t go out of our way to wind motorists up. We cycle to the conditions we find ourselves in. And daily we have our lives compromised by selfish, irresponsible driving. We endure threats and verbal abuse from passing motorists and in some cases pedestrians.
Maybe you should jump into a motoring forum and extol the motorists there to be kind and respectful to cyclists and we’ll see how long you last. I’ve seen some of the venom there and various threads and it’s not pretty. Some of the responses here are tame and couldn’t hold a candle to the stuff that you read on motoring forums. Let us know how you get on if you do so.
Garage at Large wrote:
The RPM start to drop the moment the box is in view.
Waste of time arguing with
Waste of time arguing with trolls and conspiracy twits. Obviously a vehicle that shows on both front and back cameras has finished it’s overtake as you well know. He got that from the Nicmason school of video watching and commenting.
Well thank you for citingme.
Well thank you for citing me. FWIW this is bad driving . I might even have bailed out into the verge.
Only cited you as you stated
Only cited you as you stated a very similar “well car has fully overtaken so cyclist should have slowed” statement on a video where the cyclist was still level with the front wheel of the car. Hence the Nicmason school of video watching. But you are welcome.
Not everything the Nigelov
Not everything the Nigelov Garagesky bot says is inherently troublemaking. I’ll take at face value its comment on facts and discuss those facts, but when it descends into nonsense, I am learning to laugh into my hanky at its nonsense.
The speed v RPM was briefly useful to analyse, since it does refer to a reasonable line of debate about how we should reasonably respond to being overtaken too close, but when the bot starts suggesting that RGB codes (0,0,0) = (255,255,255), the bot has ceased to serve any purpose.
GMBasix wrote:
I took that approach for a while – essentially because it was the view from the man on the Clapham omnibus or maybe even black cab driver, dressed up as a gigantic strawman. “Good at least to have the ‘mainstream’ represented albeit satirised” I thought. Unfortunately the account appears to actually be mostly for baiting clicks / stirring / knockabout however. Fortunately there are some people who hold quite different positions and will debate them rather than just being contrarians (once you make allowances for the fact that everyone likes a fight on the ‘net…)
Garage at Large wrote:
Stone cold lie. Overtake begins, 93rpm, overtake ends, 28rpm. You’re a joke.
GMBasix wrote:
There’s also the not insignificant draft effect to consider, given the size of vehicle and prevailing speeds (and -4% gradient).
BTW – I run a wheel sensor along with the GPS; theoretically ELEMNTs use both to calibrate each other to get more accurate measurements (GPS calibrates sensor when signal is good, and sensor backs up patchy signal when GPS is poor)
Interesting. In any case,
Interesting. In any case, your data do not support the bot’s troublemaking comments.
Garage at Large wrote:
damn these cyclists and their gravity assist buttons
wycombewheeler wrote:
damn these cyclists and their gravity assist buttons— Garage at Large
I think the tech you’re looking for is the fabled “inertial dampener” 😉
This is what happens when you
This is what happens when you ride in a big group holding up traffic.
If only the two cyclists had
If only the two cyclists had been riding together two abreast.
Then it would have been easier for Nigel to blame the cyclists.
Steve K wrote:
Quite. If ever a demonstration of why to ride x2, there it is.
Note not blaming the riders. Hard to ride x2 if there’s only one of you……
Steve K wrote:
Yet the imbecile still contrives to blame the cyclist for the dangerous driving!
ChrisB200SX wrote:
Indeed, but he really had to work had to find a possible way to do so.
I know cycling is much more a
I know cycling is much more a social activity than driving, but I have no desire to just latch on to the side of every random cyclist I see
It’s been some time since I
It’s been some time since I read the HC, so could someone rather more learned than me tell me what those big white capital letters “SLOW” in the road meant?
ARAF
ARAF
Its a nautical term, Speed
Its a nautical term, Speed LOts for W’ anchors
“S*** Look Out White horse
“S*** Look Out White horse box”?
Some Lycrists On Wheels
Some Lycrists On Wheels
Don’t have the artistic
Don’t have the artistic genius to come off with a satirical acronym so the official term will have to suffice Speed Low Observe Well. It’s usually applied to blind corners/summits and hump backed bridges as well as hidden junctions. Used in conjunction with other road markings and signage.
eburtthebike wrote:
So Long, Old Widgie
eburtthebike wrote:
Sod Laws, Overtake! Wheeee!
Disappointing punishment.
Disappointing punishment. The initial overtake was under 1.5 to begin with then the gradual squeeze was life threatening.
I know that road really well. Its a nice road but sh*tty for cyclists as its used a rat run between the M40 and Reading/Henley – so full of muppets. Ironically that bit is what I consider one of the “ok” bits.
The left turn there can be really busy, as its the main B road into Henley, so a stupid overtake coming up the junction is another black mark for the driver.
If I ever carry out my planned guerilla “give 1.5m to cyclists” signage attack that road is my target.
Streetview
Near death experiences with
Near death experiences with horseboxes are common in Cheshire.
I think the drivers are reluctant to brake or swerve incase it upsets their precious cargo.
I tend to put close pass drivers into one of three groups:-
1) Those that think it’s perfectly OK, after all we are both experienced, competent road users.
2) The ones that don’t see, can’t judge speed or distance.
3) The aggressive b*st*rds
This sounds like a Group #1 to me
Needs educating
Cycloid wrote:
I like the system – think that covers all bases. Hopefully levels 2 and 3 merit some form of restriction of licences!
The problem is that usually
The problem is that usually you don’t know which group the driver belongs to when you get the close pass
Also the end result is the same
It’s the group #2 ones that really scare me
Cycloid wrote:
True. They’re all bad when they pass a few inches away, or if they hit you.
Probably the distinction only matters when the court’s looking at whether they should get a punishment for killing / injuring you. In that case it seems that odds are against #1 and even #2 being punished, and #3 are the only ones likely to get more than a year…
Disappointing lack of action
Disappointing lack of action by the police here – in my opinion the horsebox driver should have received more than a warning.
But at least they did something which is more than some forces would have done. Thanks to BucksCycleCammer for taking the time and effort to submit this to the police.
Now I agree with that being a
Now I agree with that being a bad pass, with no provocation. Just plan aggression that, bad day at the races no doubt.
Great stuff! New proposals
Great stuff! New proposals for Highway Code updates from a contributor:
You SHOULD always ride single file – in order of increasing width. This means that you will soon be stuck behind the box trike. The benefits of this are that it will prevent you speeding (at less than the Minimum Speed Limit [tm]) and terrifying pedestrians AND ensure that the resulting tailback exposes you for the selfish congestion-causing purposeless nuisances that you are.
When someone overtakes you too closely, into a blind bend or without otherwise assessing the road ahead or oncoming traffic you MUST slow down and move out of the way. The driver may not have noticed you and may be moving into your space or they may want to turn left or stop the second they pass. Alternatively if they notice vehicles in front of them and realise they’ve screwed up they may need to suddenly swerve back in again and it is your responsibility to leave them space to do so.
You should be polite and courteous at all times. Driving is a stressful and often frustrating activity which tests the most patient – don’t be the trigger for their aggression. Recognise that maintaining the level of alertness to stay in control of a fast moving vehicle is beyond everyone at some point and nothing is more inflammatory than a cyclist pointing this out. No-one likes a smartass.
The only arguable criticism
The only arguable criticism you could make of the rider is that I don’t think I would ride so close to the edge.
The theory of secondary position is to ensure you are in the line of sight and it does force a better overtake… and when they decide to encroach you have some wriggle room.
However, I know roads like that and you rapidly get beaten into submission and try to be non-confrontational.
That being said, the driver clearly was aware of the cyclist and still made that move when there was no unexpected oncoming traffic which says incompetent at best, malicious at worst.
You’re right, hold the centre
You’re right, hold the centre line on narrow lanes. When appropriate (safe for rider) wave them through. Having a prominent central position gives the rider an option to move left in the event a driver inevitably makes a dangerous overtake.
So many benefits to being away from the gutter, especially in low sun periods. You are more visible to traffic, space to negotiate potholes, debris, and you control the vast majority of traffice flow.
And, when approaching a right
And, when approaching a right-hand bend, move to the left to give both you and oncoming traffic better visibility. And at all times ignore the state of the road which may be dictating where it’s better not to ride. As you’ll see in the rear view of this video, for most of this clip my choice here was ride where I did, or pretty much on the centre line.
Looking back through the
Looking back through the video. The riders position was quite close to the edge, this is why the horse box driver went for the silly overtake. Only when the driver had passed did the rider adopt a following central position-presumably with a bit of red mist. Then later moved back to the road edge.
Ride at least on the dark centre line and sometimes on the right side of centre to hold traffic around blind curves on narrow lanes.
It looks like that centre
It looks like that centre line has collected quite a bit of crud that hasn’t been cleared by traffic, though, which would make it a sketchy line to follow.
CXR94Di2 wrote:
You can make it obvious through body language, position, freewheeling and looking back, or similar that you are expecting a driver to overtake, but I would caution against ever waving somebody through. If something then happened, such as a tractor pulling out of a farm gate on the right, you might be held jointly liable for a subsequent collision.
The same is true for flashing your lights to let somebody out in a car. Instead, make it obvious by slowing that you are letting somebody out and let them make the decision.
We should avoid directing traffic.
I was recently waved through by a cyclist up in Scotland. I had been following at a graceful distance on a windy section when the cyclist, having reached the apex ahead of me waved me through. It put me in a quandry of not wishing to offend or encourage his frustration, nor wishing to hit a truck he hadn’t taken into account coming round a subsequent bend.
GMBasix wrote:
We’ve seen many videos, on this very site, of what happens when a motorist decides to flash or wave through another motorist to encourage them to pass through a gap in a traffic queue…
CXR94Di2 wrote:
rather than waving them through, when you think the overtake is on, move from primary to secondary position. A competent driver should see this as a clear signal that you are ready for them to overtake you and take it as a prompt to assess whether an overtake is feasible.
IanMSpencer wrote:
It also keeps you out of all the damage, drains and debris at the road edge, and if there is a pot hole in the secondary line, you can easily divery round it on the left rather than moving further out.
Terrible driving – really
Terrible driving – really poor. I use my bar end mirror, and attempt to move wider in the lane if needed to discourage a dangerous overtake – shouldn’t have too, & it doesn’t always work anyway.
Just remember cyclists
Just remember cyclists
pass horses wide and slow
“He also noted that the
“He also noted that the driver had watched the footage and ‘In her correspondence to the Police she raised concerns about the boasting nature of your YouTube site’.
Wow
This comment alone should see the driver signed up for a course, no remorse only finger pointing and whataboutery.
originally I was going to say I hoped the letter reminded the horse box driver that the rule relating to horses applies equally to cyclists and therefore she should pass them in exactly the same manner.
wycombewheeler wrote:
I wonder what the cyclist had been boasting about, though?
That amazing time they nearly scratched the side of a horsebox?
The time on holiday they made their own glue from a historic recipe?
I live in the coutryside and
I live in the coutryside and must confess that I avoid riding as close to the verge as the orginal poster was in this video like the plague. Ride in primary postion. I have found it,s the best way to force drivers into a safe manouver and it does give you somewhere to go. An incident from a couple of weeks ago particularly sticks in my mind. After one of driver expressing his frustration at my positioning, an Audi 4×4 better suited to navigating a low sugar ribena slick, the next vehicle, a white van, overtook me nice and wide with a big smile from the passenger. A few minutes later I saw the van pulled up and decided to thank the occupants for being so considerate. The two young men got all defensive as I approached, they obviously thought I was going to give them a mouthful, what they got was a hearty ‘thank you’. They looked delighted. I took a photo’ of their van’s logo and emailed thier employer who, judging by the response, wasn’t used to getting ‘postive feedback’. Hopefully this will encourage thoughtful driving by others within the business and got me to thinking, it’s a pity that, as a community, we cylists don’t seem to highlight other’s good behaviour. Encouragement as a tool for change really is a thing, just ask your kids…
You make a good point. Those
You make a good point. Those two guys in the van will remember that and you’ve encouraged them to do the same in the future, especially since you’ve contacted their employer. I’d put money on those guys in the van being careful to do the same kind of safe overtakes in the future. Positive reinforcement works. It’s good psychology.
That one is properly scary.
That one is properly scary. THink i would have struggled to stay upright.