The incident took place in Chevallum on the Sunshine Coast on December 27. Video uploader, Cameron, says his past experience with local police leads him to believe that they are highly unlikely to take action.
In the YouTube description, he writes: “After 4 years. This is still happening to riders in Qld. The police have no excuses for not issuing infringements in what could so easily end someone's life. No doubt this is not much different to the death of Pro rider Jason Lowndes in Victoria last week. Near miss after near miss. What the hell is wrong with people?”
Queensland was the first Australian state to implement a safe passing rule four years ago. Motorists must allow at least 1m when passing a cyclist in a 60km/h or less speed zone, or 1.5m where the speed limit is over 60km/h.
Cameron runs the Drive Safe, Pass Wide Facebook page to highlight close passes throughout Australia and has reported a number of incidents to Queensland Police.
He said that officers have provided him with, “a litany of excuses for poor driving around vulnerable road users – effectively excusing the behaviour of the drivers.”
He said: “Often I will need to follow up the first response with a second and I’ve found police will fall back on the [Queensland Police Service] operations manual under two sections: ‘Public Interest’ and ‘Things to consider when deciding to prosecute’. One of those ‘factors’ is ‘officer discretion’.”
He goes on to say that this means incidents such as this rarely come to anything.
“The personal prejudices I have felt coming from some police is quite alarming, and their opinions, attitudes and prejudices should have absolutely no impact on determining beyond reasonable doubt that a driver had passed outside the law and endangered my life.
“It seems that ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ has been put to bed in cases of close passing by police in Queensland. Instead, to dissuade a cyclist from pursuing these potentially life changing (or ending) passes there are yet more hoops to jump through and boxes that need to be ticked before anyone is issued an infringement.”
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 [at] 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.
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.