Police stop nearly 200 motorists during close pass operation

Where I live we have the 3 foot law, but the cops here don't care about it!  I was riding my bike the other day and some guy passed me within a foot of me, with a cop right behind him, the cop didn't do a darn thing.  As long as the cops don't take any action than the 3 foot law is meaningless, all that law does is make cyclists happy that their little law got on the books.

Out of 200, I wonder how many people (when stopped) said something along the lines of "What did I do?  I gave them plenty of room"...

are there some semi-apologetic posts on their Twitter feed? Ones that read "some of you criminals have contacted us to say (mustn't call them that: it's only driving) you don't like being caught committing crimes..." 

There's still too much of a disconnect between the vocabulary of motorists and cycling.

Motorists talk about 'dangerous cyclists making them feel unsafe' in context where the cyclist actually has no chance whatsoever of causing them harm. What they mean is 'they will inconvenience me', possibly 'they make me have to concentrate and make choices' or 'they might scratch my car'.

Conversely, there is really no awareness that from the cyclists perspective, motorists are a very real and constant threat to life. If a cyclist does not constantly react to motorists, they will die. If a motorist does not react to a cyclist, the driver will not.

The majority of drivers we’ve spoken to have welcomed our approach, which involves showing them videos, scenario-based demonstrations and simply talking through the issues

Ha, bloody ha! "Dear me, Officer, you mean we're not supposed to go past cyclists at 50 mph 20 cms away? Goodness me- we always do in Lancashire and we've never been told that by the police"

So about 16% of the drivers were reported for breaking the law, which seems about right, or maybe it a bit low, but I suppose they weren't checking everything on the vehicles, just the VED, insurance and MoTs.  So much for the law-abiding drivers!

Is anyone else getting annoyingly large adverts on the left of the page, obstructing the text?

 No mark Hodson mentioned in the article. He is usually at the forefront of these and used to make a related tweet ' video to show what is definitely unacceptable. Instead we have no real details on this 

Missing General Details; Chester road for example goes from 30 mph dual carriageway to 50-60 mph single carriageway across the whole WMP region, So where was this one done?

And finally, I'm sure from previous years, WMPRHRT used to do close pass, op park safe, op mobilespotting-from-a-bus, op speed checks (including a 90mph in a 40 whilst the mayor was there) at least several times a month. Now they do it once a year if we are lucky. Nope, they are definitely not as back as they once were.

By the way, a decent chance of a line or four corners in bicycle bingo in the comments. No tax or insurance although Police not chasing real criminals seems to be a new go to.But one person has posted that riders cycling two abreast forces him to go "miles onto the other side of the carriageway". With that grasp of measurement, I would hate to be be the disappointed sexual partner told about the size of his tackle beforehand. Still I'm sure that length qualifies him for a rather large BMW. 

Well done for keeping this up WMP.

One question though, were you deliberately not noticing mobile phone use?

I would love to see example footage of when drivers were " educated" and when they were prosecuted. It would be useful to know the standards we are working to when we submit footage. I'm in Glucestershire but the standards shouldn't be any different, should they?

They should have a good idea of the problem areas by now. I've submitted around 70 incidents to them in a year, and most are in the same few places each day. Driver education seems to be sorely lacking.

Now, we need West Midlands police to explain how to do this, and the benefits behind it, to those other regional forces who seem to be shirking their responsibilities.
A bit of peer reviewing wouldn't go amiss, either