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Near Miss of the Day 722: Bus driver in needless and dangerous overtake

Our regular series featuring close passes from around the country - today it's Newcastle...

In the course of the 700-plus videos we have published so far in our Near Miss of the Day series, a good few have featured drivers who simply need to get ahead of a cyclist – MGIF or ‘Must Get In Front’ as it’s commonly known – but this is one of the worst we’ve seen, and moreover is done by someone paid to drive a bus for a living.

You can see the Go North East bus driver waiting to enter the roundabout outside BEL Valves in Byker, Newcastle, as the cyclist goes through the roundabout, then cuts him up coming perilously close to hitting the rider before immediately turning right.

All for the sake of saving, what, 2 seconds? It does make you wonder what the bloody point is.

The clip was sent in by road.cc reader Leigh, who said it was “close enough to brush my arm.”

He’s sent the footage to police – although he added that he has yet to hear back from them on another near miss he submitted back in June last year.

> 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

Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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