Near Miss of the Day 559: Horse box driver gives cyclist the finger

Cycloid wrote:

Horse Box drvers are reluctant to brake or change course quickly in case it upsets their precious cargo.

You'd think they'd want to drive more slowly and carefully...

To look after the beast (and why wouldn't they - they ain't cheap) then hard acceleration braking or turning should be avoided, very smooth driving is the order of the day which is best achieved by driving slowly and observing well ahead to give them time to do all thier actions smoothly (like a showfer ).

It used to be that pulling a heavy horse box automatically induced the slow bit with low powered cars and crappy brakes, now that niether of these are an issue then too many forget the slowly bit

Makes sense - looks like sort of car the devil would own.

I agree, the following car however is at fault, doing the classic follow the previous vehicle without any consideration to anybody else.

EK Spinner wrote:

playing devils advocate a bit here and I don't know the road or the visibility leading up to this section but at the very start of the clip the rider is about 20m short of the first parked car, the pickup and trailer are already out to pass the parked car at the other end, and bearing in mind the length of the vehicle involved I wouldn't ecpect them to tuck into the gap in the parked cars as I would if it were just a car. Do they not have priority and the rider should perhaps stop and give way. Doesn't excuse the finger but does perhaps explain it

 

"20m" ?
More like around 2 cars lengths or about 10m.
>Also, you forget about thinking and reaction times - and one second in, he was already almost by the rear of the 1st parked car - at that point those on the side of the obstruction should have yielded, as required.

dodpeters wrote:

Is this why people riding bikes are supposed to be nice and say hello to people riding horses?

They're great when they're riding horses, but a lot of people totally change character when behind the steering wheel. When they're on a horse they probably have much more of a sense of vulnerability and they're more connected with the outside rather than just viewing it through a windscreen.

Not sure what it is like in your area or that of the video poster, but my local forces submission took me an hour the other weekend. That was one of three really dumb passes by drivers on a ride I wanted to report and unusually had very clear footage. The other two didn't get reported unfortunately as didn't have another two hours.
20 mins for personal details and statement (no option to save a profile and avoid keying the bits that don't change each time), 20 mins upload for first video and 20 minutes for second (as they need 1 minute each side and cannot accept edited footage, unfortunately it spanned 2 videos). My broadband is not slow, but files large and upload to that site really slow.

Off the back of that they don't even let you know what action was taken, if any.

I have raised it to my local commissioner who says they cannot get involved in the matter as it is operational, but it has been passed to the force. Won't hold my breath.

After my first submission I made a template for myself, then after completing each report just pasted the required text from that source into the various boxes as I went along, that may be something that you can do to reduce time spent?
I can submit reduced footage as long as the original stays on the original device untouched if it is required, so that makes it shorter to upload.

Yep, can be a massive chore to do sometimes. The form is fast to fill in however they don't allow large files so I have to convert and compress on the computer. The time is taken by uploading the files from the camera, finding the right 11 minute segment (which in an hour could be five). Then finding the 4 mins either side. Clipping it, then converting to Avi to load into the GoPro footage editor, then converting back to a Youtube type for more compression before loading it through the webpage. 

So for all that work, with no acknowledgement of anything including a crime number (the portal emails to say it was uploaded and then nothing), it can be offputting. 

However I did try uploading a clip directly without compression the other day so they might have upped the limit for the file sizes or no one else is submitting so no contention on the shared drive.

This is exactly the sort of thing the police and crime commissioner should be getting involved in! 
Keeping a victim/complainant updated is not an 'operational matter'.