Leicester cyclist "nearly killed" by HGV driver left frustrated by police response
Cyclist frustrated by police inaction after being "nearly killed" by lorry driver, as rider told he was in "blind spot" and driver in company vehicle can't be traced
Cyclist told to use cycle lane next time as police question if rider was in blind spot, despite riding in middle of lane and force admitting he was wearing hi-vis and had lights
A cyclist, who narrowly avoided being hit by an HGV driver who pulled out in front of the rider at a junction on Friday evening, has expressed frustration with the police's inaction and suggested Leicestershire Police "have shrugged it off" and claim to be unable to trace the driver of a company-branded vehicle.
Sharing footage of the incident, road.cc reader Alex explained how he was "nearly killed" while he cycled home at around 9pm on Putney Road W in Leicester on Friday, the driver pulling out at a junction, forcing him to swerve to avoid a collision.
When the video footage was submitted to the county's police force he received a phone call on Sunday morning, explaining that no further action was going to be taken as the date and time stamp on the footage displayed incorrect details, plus "we don't have a name for the driver" having "run the vehicle through".
Instead, Alex was advised by the police staffer he spoke with to use the cycle lane that runs alongside the road in future. As Alex explained in the video uploaded to his YouTube channel and in speaking with us, he had joined the road for this section as beyond the next set of lights the cycle lane stops and he would have to ride on the bus lane anyway, so "to use the bike lane [in full] I would need to cross over the road at least four times".
With how quiet the road was on a Friday evening he did not anticipate any issues but, at the turning for Commercial Square the HGV driver approached the junction and swung out as he passed, Alex having to swerve to avoid being hit.
While speaking to the police about why no further action was to be taken, a phone call that has been heard by road.cc, the cyclist was told he could have been in the driver's blind spot.
At one point, Alex was told: "The lorry [driver] should have stopped at the junction but at the same time [...] possibly, arguably you'd be in the blind spot."
It was suggested this might be worse as the lorry driver is higher up and it "could be difficult to see" the cyclist passing, despite him riding in the centre of the lane, moving towards the centre of the road as the lorry driver nears the turning showing no sign of slowing, and having significant lighting to make himself visible to other road users.
The incorrect date and time were cited as the "main" reason why a "realistic prospect of conviction" is unlikely, but the police staffer went on to add: "We don't have a name for the driver."
Alex was also advised "it's really important that you do keep yourself safe" and told to "for your own safety stick to the cycle lanes [...] especially when they come up to junctions and you are essentially the weakest link on the road because you've got the least protection".
Alex told us: "I saw a lorry approaching and, having some bright lights and hi-vis jacket and a speaker playing music out loud, I thought the driver would have seen me. From the video footage it does not appear the lorry made any attempt to stop or even hit the brakes."
At the next set of traffic lights Alex noted the number plate and questioned the driver but soon "felt a threat" from the response, which was not picked up in the footage, and crossed the road to report the incident to 101.
"The next day I was contacted by phone to be asked what happened and to provide video evidence through the NICE police link," he continued. "I was not sure the best course of action but at the very least I think a driving suspension would be appropriate with what happened.
"On Sunday morning I received a phone call from the police at 8:30am approximately. The officer I spoke to advised me that as a cyclist it would be best and safest for me to stick to the bike lanes that are provided. The reason I did not use the bike track is because at the next junction the road I wish to join does not have a bike track and cyclists need to rejoin the main carriageway.
"To use the bike lane I would need to cross over the road at least four times leading to potential conflict with other road users that may not follow the rules. The police officer also stated the time stamp on my camera was incorrect. I have tried to correct this before but I also called the police straight after this happened. I would not have any reason to lie either about such an event.
"And finally the officer told me they checked the plates on the lorry but because they cannot find out who the lorry driver was there was no further action they could take and therefore told me on the phone they would close this case with no further action unless the lorry is flagged up in another report."
road.cc raised the case with Leicestershire Police, a force spokesperson stating:
At around 9pm on Friday (6 September) a report was received concerning an incident in Putney Road, Leicester.
The report was made by a cyclist stating he had nearly been involved in a collision with a lorry. He did not report any physical injuries and there was no collision between either party, but stated he had been verbally abused by the driver.
The cyclist provided a body-worn video, which has been reviewed by officers.
After careful analysis and assessment, it was determined that there were evidential difficulties. The report of verbal abuse by the driver could not be heard in the video. Therefore the decision was taken that the incident will remain on file pending any new information being reported to police.
Contact was made by the force with the complainant to fully explain this outcome decision and to provide advice.
Help us to fund our site
We’ve noticed you’re using an ad blocker. If you like road.cc, but you don’t like ads, please consider subscribing to the site to support us directly. As a subscriber you can read road.cc ad-free, from as little as £1.99.
If you don’t want to subscribe, please turn your ad blocker off. The revenue from adverts helps to fund our site.
If you’ve enjoyed this article, then please consider subscribing to road.cc from as little as £1.99. Our mission is to bring you all the news that’s relevant to you as a cyclist, independent reviews, impartial buying advice and more. Your subscription will help us to do more.
Dan is the road.cc news editor and has spent the past four years writing stories and features, as well as (hopefully) keeping you entertained on the live blog. Having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for the Non-League Paper, Dan joined road.cc in 2020. Come the weekend you'll find him labouring up a hill, probably with a mouth full of jelly babies, or making a bonk-induced trip to a south of England petrol station... in search of more jelly babies.
On this one the Leicestershire Constabulary response seems dishonest - on the blaind spot point - the driver just has a responsibility to look and see, and misleading in general.
The response from Leicestershire Police is poor, completely ignoring the elephant in the room, the very obvious issue with the way the HGV was driven, failing to stop / give way at a junction where legally required to do so. It's almost as if motoring offences have been wiped from the statute book in certain police force areas.
How the driver didn't see the cyclist is beyond me. You can see from the reflections that the cyclist has bright lighting. At night you can't miss that. The driver either was distracted (on the phone) or simply didn't care. Add to that the threatening comments and you have to ask how incompetent the police have to be not to respond?
Send the footage to the company. Maybe they'll do something, maybe not.
If that cyclist is in a blind spot given they have moved well out from the kerb, I can't see how the driver would see anything smaller than a 7.5T van...
Of course the reality is they approached it at a speed where they assumed they could just carry on through (possibly in this case relying on bright headlights).
I would be very very surprised if a company had enough HGV's moving at night for them not to be able to identify the driver from location, rough time (i.e. within an hour) licence plate and tacho data. All of which are either provided or (in the case of tacho data) are legally required...
This whole story is a collection of pathetic police dodges- they don't make any sense because they don't have to! There is no supervision of the police in any sensible way. The time is wrong...we can't do anything-there is no rear-facing camera...we can't do anything- there is no calibrated overhead drone footage...we can't do anything etc. etc. I have GPS timing on my videos/ photos- this is accurate internally to tiny fractions of a second, and the displayed time (although the ancient unsupported GoPro software only gives minutes) is 'accurate' to a second compared to network or Rugby radio time. If it's not receiving GPS correctly, it doesn't display at all. I'm sure the police would dispute this if it suited them, but it doesn't really apply as they bin them all anyway
Are calls to 101 recorded? If so, they can verify the time of the video that way and can ignore the incorrect timestamp. (Yes, I know police are just using the timestamp as an excuse to not do anything.)
Laughable being told to use a cycle lane by some who's probably never used one except to park in....
Passive cycling/anti cycling layout by the local authority from the sound of it.
In defence of 'not using the cycle path', I sometimes use this route and I can confidently state that the bicycle infrastructure on Putney Road is very badly designed. I would advise everyone I know to stay in the main carriageway as it is much faster, safer, and more comfortable. In the space of 500m there are three locations where the flow of bicycle traffic is forced to come to a halt. Two of the locations are light controlled Toucan crossings where the cycle path crosses from one side of Putney Road to the other, and then back again. I have recently reviewed the Putney Road cycle path against the Crow Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic and it does not fare well. If you are interested, here is my review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrGLu9X3Buo
Firstly I want to say its a pleasure to meet you and I follow your videos often on YouTube which are very clean and clear. I wanted to ask you, do you still report dangerous driving to the police and have you had much response from them recently?
I reported two near misses on Wednesday night this week and they have not requested any of the video footage I advised in my report. Normally they request such information in 24hrs of the report and its now been 48hrs since I reported two drivers that nearly hit me on my bike.
Im growing suspisious the Leicester police are ignorning me.
Also if your happy to it be great to keep in contact with you and nice to know a fellow cyclist in the same city as Me on top of poor driving standards too.
As said before about blind spots, drivers are meant to move their head to look around blind spots. Lorry driver was over committed to junction and rolling through whatever had the right of way.
Also, if they can't trace driver of a company vehicle then that is clearly a Health and Safety Executive issue as it is required by law to know who is driving what vehicle at any time.
Try for a review of the decision and also consider approaching H&S people with information helpfully provided by the police.
JHFC. To paraphrase* Wolfgang Pauli, Leiestershire Police aren't even wrong.
Difficult to know where to start. The wilful ignorance of the Highway Code, general road safety, or the absolute basics of carrying out an investigation. I know it's Leicestershire and not much happens there, but that's no excuse for such halfwitted douchebaggery.
No, the high point - not that I'm suggesting that Leicestershire Police had been at the funny cakes with their morning tea - has got to be their dazzlingly stupid late entry for the 2024 Making Stuff** Up Championship with "you were in the blind spot". In front of the truck, right in the sightline of where the road user coming out from a minor road can and damn well should be looking. Any blind spot would on the NS/RNS of the vehicle. FMJ.
* probably inaccurately, apocryphally, and definitely in the wrong language. ** Just in case my Nanna reads this forum.
(for what it is worth, my old camera used to occasionally re-set the time stamp, so that the time stamp was out by several years. This was never a barrier to prosecution, including for some quite serious stuff like an assault I witnessed, as well as close passes)
(for what it is worth, my old camera used to occasionally re-set the time stamp, so that the time stamp was out by several years. This was never a barrier to prosecution, including for some quite serious stuff like an assault I witnessed, as well as close passes)
I've never bothered turning the time and date stamp on for my GoPro (if there is an incident I can get the exact time off Garmin/Strava) and not once have the police or the defence questioned it over numerous tickets and several court cases. When you submit a video, at least to the Met, you have to sign a declaration that what you have said - including date and time - is true and that should be sufficient. Any police force claiming an innaccurate timestamp makes a conviction unlikely is simply lying.
You're right I got a successful NIP on a car driver with the time being out by a couple of hours and the police weren't unduly bothered as long as I had the time and date in my statement the Audi driver got the brown envelope treatment.
You're right I got a successful NIP on a car driver with the time being out by a couple of hours and the police weren't unduly bothered as long as I had the time and date in my statement the Audi driver got the brown envelope treatment.
My previous versions of Cycliq cameras were always drifting away from the real time and almost never agreed with each other, but that was never an issue with submitting to Avon & Somerset police. I just mentioned how far out each camera was.
To my mind, surely it's better to have a time watermark as that makes the footage harder to fake/edit and harder for the driver to dismiss (especially with both front and rear). Of course, you need to live in an area where the police take an interest in traffic policing.
I got a successful NIP on a car driver with the time being out by a couple of hours
People often state this as if a NIP is the same as a prosecution. This is another common police dodge. Maybe you did achieve actual action, but it's common for NIPs to be binned/ not followed up for any number of dodge-type reasons without telling the complainant
Well yeah but at least they would have probably sent something, it was Norfolk police and at the time they were being pretty hot on close passes. I did follow up and they gave me the it takes 6 months routine and to be honest I lost interest after that but if the envelope dropped on the drivers door mat and it inconvenienced them in some way then it's a result 👍
Needing a "correct timestamp" is on the same list as needing:
1 minute of footage before and after incident. Some part of the bike in the video. The driver to remember the incident. Colour of the bushes to contrast enough with what you were wearing. The angle of the sun to be ok. There not to be a cycle lane somewhere near. A shared path sign to be either nearer or further away. The driver to come in to make a statement, but only when someone is around to take the statement otherwise it's case closed. etc
Add new comment
22 comments
On this one the Leicestershire Constabulary response seems dishonest - on the blaind spot point - the driver just has a responsibility to look and see, and misleading in general.
Rep of Leics Constabulary is mud.
The response from Leicestershire Police is poor, completely ignoring the elephant in the room, the very obvious issue with the way the HGV was driven, failing to stop / give way at a junction where legally required to do so. It's almost as if motoring offences have been wiped from the statute book in certain police force areas.
How the driver didn't see the cyclist is beyond me. You can see from the reflections that the cyclist has bright lighting. At night you can't miss that. The driver either was distracted (on the phone) or simply didn't care. Add to that the threatening comments and you have to ask how incompetent the police have to be not to respond?
Send the footage to the company. Maybe they'll do something, maybe not.
If that cyclist is in a blind spot given they have moved well out from the kerb, I can't see how the driver would see anything smaller than a 7.5T van...
Of course the reality is they approached it at a speed where they assumed they could just carry on through (possibly in this case relying on bright headlights).
I would be very very surprised if a company had enough HGV's moving at night for them not to be able to identify the driver from location, rough time (i.e. within an hour) licence plate and tacho data. All of which are either provided or (in the case of tacho data) are legally required...
This whole story is a collection of pathetic police dodges- they don't make any sense because they don't have to! There is no supervision of the police in any sensible way. The time is wrong...we can't do anything-there is no rear-facing camera...we can't do anything- there is no calibrated overhead drone footage...we can't do anything etc. etc. I have GPS timing on my videos/ photos- this is accurate internally to tiny fractions of a second, and the displayed time (although the ancient unsupported GoPro software only gives minutes) is 'accurate' to a second compared to network or Rugby radio time. If it's not receiving GPS correctly, it doesn't display at all. I'm sure the police would dispute this if it suited them, but it doesn't really apply as they bin them all anyway
It is funny that a company that can afford multiple vehicles of that size can't afford to have a website for the business...
Are calls to 101 recorded? If so, they can verify the time of the video that way and can ignore the incorrect timestamp. (Yes, I know police are just using the timestamp as an excuse to not do anything.)
Laughable being told to use a cycle lane by some who's probably never used one except to park in....
Passive cycling/anti cycling layout by the local authority from the sound of it.
In defence of 'not using the cycle path', I sometimes use this route and I can confidently state that the bicycle infrastructure on Putney Road is very badly designed. I would advise everyone I know to stay in the main carriageway as it is much faster, safer, and more comfortable. In the space of 500m there are three locations where the flow of bicycle traffic is forced to come to a halt. Two of the locations are light controlled Toucan crossings where the cycle path crosses from one side of Putney Road to the other, and then back again. I have recently reviewed the Putney Road cycle path against the Crow Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic and it does not fare well. If you are interested, here is my review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrGLu9X3Buo
Hi Neal,
Firstly I want to say its a pleasure to meet you and I follow your videos often on YouTube which are very clean and clear. I wanted to ask you, do you still report dangerous driving to the police and have you had much response from them recently?
I reported two near misses on Wednesday night this week and they have not requested any of the video footage I advised in my report. Normally they request such information in 24hrs of the report and its now been 48hrs since I reported two drivers that nearly hit me on my bike.
Im growing suspisious the Leicester police are ignorning me.
Also if your happy to it be great to keep in contact with you and nice to know a fellow cyclist in the same city as Me on top of poor driving standards too.
Kind Regards
Alex
Disgusting inaction from the police, but sadly all too familiar.
If I was this cyclist, I would do an 'audit' of this company. In the same manor as DJ Audits for example.
EDIT: Now that I have read this article fully, it is clear the Police made no attempt (ie s172) to obtain the driver's details from the company.
I think I will ask the BBB about the legitimacy of rejecting video evidence with an incorrect timestamp, when there is first hand witness evidence.
AIUI an accompanying written witness statement overrides the time stamp.
Good to hear BBB on this though.
Glad you're okay!
As said before about blind spots, drivers are meant to move their head to look around blind spots. Lorry driver was over committed to junction and rolling through whatever had the right of way.
Also, if they can't trace driver of a company vehicle then that is clearly a Health and Safety Executive issue as it is required by law to know who is driving what vehicle at any time.
Try for a review of the decision and also consider approaching H&S people with information helpfully provided by the police.
JHFC. To paraphrase* Wolfgang Pauli, Leiestershire Police aren't even wrong.
Difficult to know where to start. The wilful ignorance of the Highway Code, general road safety, or the absolute basics of carrying out an investigation. I know it's Leicestershire and not much happens there, but that's no excuse for such halfwitted douchebaggery.
No, the high point - not that I'm suggesting that Leicestershire Police had been at the funny cakes with their morning tea - has got to be their dazzlingly stupid late entry for the 2024 Making Stuff** Up Championship with "you were in the blind spot". In front of the truck, right in the sightline of where the road user coming out from a minor road can and damn well should be looking. Any blind spot would on the NS/RNS of the vehicle. FMJ.
* probably inaccurately, apocryphally, and definitely in the wrong language. ** Just in case my Nanna reads this forum.
Institutionally anti-cyclist
(for what it is worth, my old camera used to occasionally re-set the time stamp, so that the time stamp was out by several years. This was never a barrier to prosecution, including for some quite serious stuff like an assault I witnessed, as well as close passes)
I've never bothered turning the time and date stamp on for my GoPro (if there is an incident I can get the exact time off Garmin/Strava) and not once have the police or the defence questioned it over numerous tickets and several court cases. When you submit a video, at least to the Met, you have to sign a declaration that what you have said - including date and time - is true and that should be sufficient. Any police force claiming an innaccurate timestamp makes a conviction unlikely is simply lying.
You're right I got a successful NIP on a car driver with the time being out by a couple of hours and the police weren't unduly bothered as long as I had the time and date in my statement the Audi driver got the brown envelope treatment.
My previous versions of Cycliq cameras were always drifting away from the real time and almost never agreed with each other, but that was never an issue with submitting to Avon & Somerset police. I just mentioned how far out each camera was.
To my mind, surely it's better to have a time watermark as that makes the footage harder to fake/edit and harder for the driver to dismiss (especially with both front and rear). Of course, you need to live in an area where the police take an interest in traffic policing.
I got a successful NIP on a car driver with the time being out by a couple of hours
People often state this as if a NIP is the same as a prosecution. This is another common police dodge. Maybe you did achieve actual action, but it's common for NIPs to be binned/ not followed up for any number of dodge-type reasons without telling the complainant
Well yeah but at least they would have probably sent something, it was Norfolk police and at the time they were being pretty hot on close passes. I did follow up and they gave me the it takes 6 months routine and to be honest I lost interest after that but if the envelope dropped on the drivers door mat and it inconvenienced them in some way then it's a result 👍
Needing a "correct timestamp" is on the same list as needing:
1 minute of footage before and after incident. Some part of the bike in the video. The driver to remember the incident. Colour of the bushes to contrast enough with what you were wearing. The angle of the sun to be ok. There not to be a cycle lane somewhere near. A shared path sign to be either nearer or further away. The driver to come in to make a statement, but only when someone is around to take the statement otherwise it's case closed. etc