Near Miss of the Day 487: "This vehicle is turning left" (having first pulled alongside you)

Today’s near miss features a driver pulling alongside a cyclist from behind before moving left into the same lane. The sheer lunacy of the manoeuvre is compounded by the presence of a parked vehicle in the cyclist’s lane and the ominous audible warning that, “this vehicle is turning left.” As an unlikely postscript, however, it does seem that it was one occasion where a driver improvement course had some sort of positive effect.

The incident occurred in Holborn, London, in December 2018.

Joel said: “It was without a doubt one of the more frightening bad passes I have had. I could of course hear the ‘this vehicle is turning left’ blaring out, but as the vehicle was pulling up from behind me and I knew that it had been behind me for some way, it never occurred to me for a moment that having drawn alongside in the other lane, that he would then try to pull into my lane on top of me.”

Joel complained to the firm, “and got a canned response, promising to talk to the driver’s department and come back to me – which they never did.”

He also reported it to the Met, who later informed him that the driver had accepted and completed a driving improvement course.

Joel said he felt this was “pretty light” for what the driver had actually done.

“However, a month or so after, I was cycling in roughly the same place – just out of the roundabout and at the start of High Holborn – and got tooted.

“I looked to my right and the same van was passing with a good few metres clearance in the next lane, and clearly wanted me to appreciate how far away he was.

“As my goal in submitting any of these reports is to make the roads safer for myself and others if possible, I'm very happy that there is now at least one much safer driver on the road.”

> 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 [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.

> What to do if you capture a near miss or close pass (or worse) on camera while cycling