A cyclist has shared footage of the terrifying moment they were almost knocked from their bike at a roundabout, the “very experienced” rider saying this incident was “by far the scariest I’ve had while cycling”.
“I was certain that a high speed collision was imminent,” Geraint told road.cc. Despite wearing a bright orange jersey and there being good visibility on the day, the driver of the Ford somehow failed to see him at the roundabout, pulling out and almost hitting the rider.
It happened as Geraint returned to Glasgow from Eaglesham Moor. He was crossing the roundabout between Eaglesham and Waterfoot, which links Glasgow Road to the Glasgow Southern Orbital, when it happened, the rear-facing camera showing just how close to a collision the driver came.
“I purchased Cycliq cameras after a coach ran over my bike, destroying my back wheel, and the civilian on the police station counter said that without corroborating video evidence, nothing would come from that complaint – there was no CCTV footage and they were right,” Geraint explained. “I now always ride with cameras.
“I’m a very experienced road cyclist. This incident was by far the scariest I’ve had while cycling. I was certain that a high-speed collision was imminent. I was wearing a bright orange jersey and there was good visibility. There was also a strong crosswind (approx 25-30 km/hr) which is why I was positioned well away from the edges of the roundabout; and that may have saved me on this occasion.
“It is not obvious in the video, but at the point that I was directly in front of the car and it was not visible to either camera, the front of the car dipped very noticeably as the driver braked very hard at the last moment.”
It was reported to Police Scotland and, on the 12 August, Geraint received a voicemail from an officer at Giffnock Police Station stating that, in their opinion and after seeking the advice of colleagues, the driving did not fall below the standard of a competent and careful driver.
Geraint has written to Police Scotland requesting a review of the decision.
> 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
39 thoughts on “Near Miss of the Day 932: Experienced cyclist says this near-collision “was by far the scariest I’ve had while cycling”… but police take no further action”
Blimey that was close. Driver
Blimey that was close. Driver needs some hefty points and a fine for that dangerous emerge. What did they think the driver in lane 2 was stopped for?!
Cyclist’s position away from the junction definately saved them there.
From everything that I have
From everything that I have heard and experienced, road crime is basically legalized in Scotland.
They’re simply not really interested unless someone actually gets hit and injured, and sometimes not even then
Police Scotland don’t care
Police Scotland don’t care about these incidents, only if you hurt someone’s feelings.
In fact, I’ve been on the receiving end of close passes by them on several occassions and know that I’m not alone in that. How can they go after drivers when they enjoy harming vunerable road users?
good luck, can only hope the
good luck, can only hope the vehicle isn’t a hire car from somewhere in england. had 2 recently in convoy make terrible overtakes but ScotPlod wouldnt even send the companies a Section172 to find out the driver details
I know that round about,
I know that round about, having lived in the area.
There is an underpass for cyclists & pedestrians but, for the direction he was travelling in, it on the wrong side of the road.
I remembered something about
I remembered something about this and asked chat got..
Yes—there is a phenomenon in human vision that’s somewhat analogous to the idea of a film being made of discrete frames.
This concept is often tied to two ideas in vision science:
1. Saccades and Saccadic Suppression
Your eyes don’t smoothly scan a scene; instead, they make rapid, ballistic movements called saccades several times per second (typically 3–5 per second).
During these saccades, visual input is suppressed (your brain actually blocks out the blurry input during eye movement). This is called saccadic suppression.
As a result, your conscious visual experience isn’t a continuous “stream” of all the raw data hitting your retina—it’s a series of relatively still snapshots taken during the fixations between saccades
interesting
interesting
having been in the same situation as the above near-miss but not having been “missed”, I’ve become very keen to understand why so many drivers fail to see cyclists at roundabouts. I think the main issue is the design of many roundabouts: they encourage fast entry and exit. Combine that with the complexity of visual inputs as drivers approach the junction, and it becomes a recipe — or as I call it, a “repicy” — for weak drivers to panic from overload, or simply rely on habit and drive into the junction because it worked last time. Also read the The Invisible Gorilla.
so what I do – apart from mostly avoiding roundabouts these days – is I try to see if they move their heads. Like the above situation where cars/drivers are not in my direct line of sight, I am still evaluating the best actions. Slowing down to see them; calculating whether I can get ahead (as above, just), but mostly not taking for granted what drivers should do. Thoughts welcome.
PS I live in Scotland
ran this thru AI – a better version it made:
🚴 roundabouts, reflexes & risk: why cyclists keep getting “missed”, (or not!)
The recent near-miss shared by experienced cyclist Geraint — described as the scariest he’s had while cycling — hits close to home. Despite wearing a bright orange jersey and riding in broad daylight with good visibility, he was nearly struck at a roundabout by a driver who apparently never saw him. Having faced similar moments myself, I’ve often wondered: why do so many drivers “miss” cyclists in these high-risk environments?
From my experience, it’s rarely just about visibility or cyclist behavior. The anatomy of roundabout design plays a major role. Many layouts seem engineered to invite fast entry and exit — minimizing perceived delay, but also compressing the window in which drivers make critical visual assessments.
Now mix that with the sheer volume of visual information flying at a driver: cars from multiple directions, lane markings, mirrors, signage, and — hopefully — vulnerable road users like cyclists. It’s a cognitive storm. For drivers with slower reflexes or limited scanning habits, this overload can lead to panic or autopilot decisions: “it worked last time,” so they dive in.
This phenomenon is beautifully illustrated in The Invisible Gorilla, the 2010 book by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The authors famously demonstrated how people, when focused on one task, often fail to notice unexpected yet glaring events — like a gorilla walking through a scene. It’s called inattentional blindness, and it’s a potent force on the road. A driver focused on finding a gap may genuinely not perceive a cyclist in plain view. It’s not just bad driving — it’s the brain missing what’s there.
Here’s where eye movements enter the conversation. Visual neuroscience tells us that:
Drivers who don’t visibly move their heads — relying solely on peripheral or habitual glances — may not be engaging their vestibular systems fully, potentially failing to detect smaller or faster-moving objects like bikes. I now watch for this: do they turn their heads? If not, I slow down, recalculate, and never assume they’ll do the right thing.
Roundabout safety shouldn’t rely on luck or reflex alone. It’s time we talked seriously about design standards that slow vehicles, reduce panic, and support better visibility for everyone sharing the road.
https://www.londoncyclist.co
What an RAF pilot can teach us about being safe on the road (very old London Cyclist blogpost)
https://www.londoncyclist.co.uk/raf-pilot-teach-cyclists/
there is a roughly two-year
there is a roughly two-year lead time for dangerous driving prosecutions at the moment in Scotland
No, there’s a 2 year wait while they are expecting nearly all victims to have lost interest or to have been KSI’d by another hardworking driver, before they (described as CPS in England, maybe it’s The Fiscal there, but it’s really the police) decide to abandon any prosecution because ‘insert any old reason, no matter how stupid, here’.
Phew!
Phew!
When I ride around a roundabout, I tend to slow before passing an entry to the roundabout. You cannot afford to assume that any entering driver has seen you – unfortunately.
There have been a few times I have been glad that I slowed.
Appalling. I’ve been thinking
Appalling. I’ve been thinking for sometime now that give way lines are actually a ridiculous concept at busy junctions, relying as they do on the driver/cyclist to mark their own homework in the sense that they say you can go ahead and roll into the junction without stopping as long as you decide there’s nothing coming. As we’ve seen on countless NMOTDs and I’m sure we all experience every day as cyclists and drivers, many people simply lack the capacity or the inclination to make proper observations before rolling through a give way. Surely much more sensible to have stop lines and if people still can’t check properly before pulling away from them, traffic lights.
Rendel Harris wrote:
This is smart thinking (for road safety) – and mirrors the approach taken in “safe system” schemes:
The point of roadabouts is that they offer higher throughput rates (still the #1 goal for UK traffic designers I think) with pretty good safety – even where there are impacts the speed is usually slowed. But they’re not magic – even ignoring vulnerable road users if capacity or speed is high enough in the UK we apply traffic light controls (see many gyratories).
I don’t see that throughout
I don’t see that throughout rate would be hugely impacted by stop line instead of give way? It only needs a momentary pause after all.
That is appalling driving.
That is appalling driving. Was the driver on the phone or drunk? I’d like to think the police would take action. That driver shouldn’t be behind the wheel. But as it’s Police Scotland, it’ll probably be overlooked.
I drive through that
I drive through that roundabout much more frequently than I ride through it, it is horrribly laid out. The GSO is a 70 limit dual carriageway, limit drops to 30 for the roundabout only then back up to 70.
I seem to remember reading about a fatal crash recently for someone riding through it in the same direction as this clip but I couldn’t find details on a quick search (partly because there was another unrelated one in Eaglesham in January)
I presume that this was the
I presume that this was the old “only looking for motor cars” situation? A cyclist probably wasn’t even something that they were looking for on the roundabout, so they didn’t see them (or register them).
brooksby wrote:
I’ve eyeballed drivers making eye contact with them, and still had them pulling out or doing a right turn right across my path like I wasn’t there so many times. Utterly Infuriating
The fact that the first car
The fact that the first car approaching the junction was stopped and not proceeding is a very clear indication that there was traffic on the roundabout and that driver was ceding priority. If the driver of the white car isn’t clever enough to deduce that, they shouldn’t have a driving licence. But since it’s happened to me, and apparently to many others, not much will happen to them.
Came here to say:
Came here to say:
1. what burt said – why on earth would you roll out while the car already at the roundabout is still
2. I know Geraint saw it happening at the time but, based on the front / rear video perspectives alone, this made me think of times I’ve reviewed my footage afterwards and been horrified of stuff happening behind me that I was blissfully unaware of on the ride
That the driver didn’t see is
That the driver didn’t see is a presumption. It’s equally possible the driver believed, as many drivers seem to believe, that MVs have the right-of-way everywhere and cyclists should have the “good sense” to stop for them.
cmedred wrote:
Very true, and add to that the fact that many drivers, despite the fact that apparently there are swarms of us clad in lycra breaking speed limits (that don’t exist) everywhere, seem to assess cyclist speed at a value around what their own was the last time they were on a bike aged thirteen – he’s 25 metres away, I’ve got at least three seconds to get out before he gets here…
This is acarbon copy of a
This is acarbon copy of a near incident that I had last week on the Sunshine Coast in QLD. Noosa has no traffic light intersections and has a million roundabouts instead. With fewer cars on the road than in this example, I felt afterwards that the driver must have barely bothered to look right before entering the roundabout. From my perspective, they appeared to slow while approaching the entry to the rounbabout giving me the confidence to power through to the second exit (similar to this example).
It’s amazing how big a Mazda 3 looks when it’s travelling at 40km/h and about 15mm from your back wheel! If I hadn’t looked over my left shoulder I probably wouldn’t have known how close I came to being knocked down. In the split second, I was preparing to unclip and hit the road, but didn’t need to. I had to stop shortly afterwards though, to collect myself – a bit shaky.
I still don’t know if the driver ever saw me at all. Although they would probably have heard me and maybe learned a few new words.
It’s getting worse out there…
That rear camera looks scary!
That rear camera looks scary! I’ve had close ones where’s there’s been no visibility but it looks like there was plenty of visibility in that case!
My closest at a dual entry roundabout was an actual contact. From an elevated position I seen the roof of a muppet undertaking the right turn queue in the left lane. He shot straight out on to the roundabout in front of me. On a steep downhill there was no way I could stop but because I’d seen their roof early enough I was able to change my path to a right turn and bash the rear wheel slightly off them.
It’s because I have incidents
It’s because I have incidents like this so frequently on a roundabout right next to the Greater Manchester Police Headquarters, that I purchased a rear camera/light. When numerous incidents are viewed on my existing helmet-mounted camera, it just never looks as bad, or worse, I fail to capture the incident at the most vital moment.
The rear-facing camera, for me at least, has become priceless for capturing these incidents and is superb at demonstrating how close a close pass actually was, thanks to a graphical overlay I created with 250mm spacings from my bike frame outward.
institutionally anti-cyclist
institutionally anti-cyclist
I live on Bedfordshire and
I live on Bedfordshire and the Beds, Herts and Cambs road policing unit refuse to say whether they have taken action in any case. And in the odd case where I have been injured they have decided not to take a tion. They wonder why the police are not trusted.
Yes, I had a number of
Yes, I had a number of professional standards complaints upheld against Cambridgeshire Police for simply not investigating. That was when they decided that “data privacy” prevented them from providing outcomes to victims. They have consistently received ~3000 third party video submissions a year. West Yorks have 30% prosecution rate, Cambridge was 0.08% for 2023 & 0% for 2024. That’s why they don’t provide feedback.
Well done! It’s not possible
Well done! It’s not possible in Lancashire, because of a hopeless PCC. Who upheld your complaints- the police’s own ‘Professional Standards’?!
Yes, after a fashion. They
Yes, after a fashion. They ignored the Prof Stds compliant until I tweet-shamed the PCC. Found that there were “grounds for disciplinary action against both officers”, but didn’t do so as one retired the week before they concluded the 2 year Investigation & the other one was on.long-term sick. Now it is not possible to complain that they haven’t investigated as they refuse to provide information on whether they have.
I had a number of complaints
I had a number of complaints upheld. Their decision has now to tell me they will stop processing my complaints, even if the PCC tells them to.
I had a number of complaints
I had a number of complaints upheld. Their decision [is] now to tell me they will stop processing my complaints, even if the PCC tells them to
John Tizard is the PCC for the police in your region. I think a stiff letter to him should do the trick
Whereas I think it will do no good at all- if this advice is followed, please let us know what Tizard/ minions said
I invite you all to join me in despising the police! (and the PCC)
simon59 wrote:
Simon59 – John Tizard is the PCC for the police in your region. I think a stiff letter to him should do the trick. This is what he is paid to do – to overseer police action on behalf of constituients like yourself.
That’s Police Scotland for
That’s Police Scotland for you.
Good luck. Police Scotland
Good luck. Police Scotland will systematically and universally reject any cycling report that doesn’t involve an actual collision.
Worst police force for cycle offence reporting in the country IMO.
Oh, and if you happen to be a tourist, they won’t even look at it due to requiring an in person interview to proceed, and unless you’ve submitted the report on day 1 of your holiday then you’ll be home by the time they respond so in the bin it goes!
Being an owner of a ford smax
Being an owner of a ford smax which was featured in the clip, i know that the A pillar on this vehicle causes a significant blind spot which could explain the near miss. Might be useful for there to be regulations in place to ensure all vehicles meet standards in terms of giving drivers all round visibility to reduce accidents.
I’m sure that’s a factor –
I’m sure that’s a factor – but surely it’s not a big enough blind spot to obscure the car already stationary at the roundabout, which should have given them pause for thought…
I know that the A pillar on
I know that the A pillar on this vehicle causes a significant blind spot which responsible drivers appreciate immediately and mitigate by moving their heads about, as opposed to remaining unthinkingly slob-still and complaining that they already have too much to do with all the eating, drinking, smoking, adjusting the tech-screens and arguing with people on the phone to worry about bloody cyclists, which
could explainis seized upon by the overmanned (in order to ensure that there are insufficient staff to look at video complaints) force Driver Excuses Squad to ‘justify and NFA’ the near missMight be useful as an additional ‘blame somebody else’ excuse for drivers for there to be regulations in place to ensure all vehicles meet standards in terms of giving drivers all round visibility to reduce accidents even though the obvious overarching problem is that the drivers can’t be bothered to look for anything except vehicles which might damage them and their precious ‘motah’
The A pillar is that thick to
The A pillar is that thick to protect drivers, with the perverse effect that other people, especially cyclists, are endangered. Also, making the driver feel safer means that they will take more risks, which further endangers other people.
The best way to improve road safety is to remove all the safety devices for drivers, including making the A pillars out of straw and very thin.
There are regulations on
There are regulations on getting a licence that require drivers to look all round – this involves moving at least the head in any car.
Reminders might be needed.