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I have sent the following to the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commisioner and fully expect to be at best fobbed off and in all likelihood ignored, so am also posting it here as i beleive others may have had similar experiences. I have photos of the crash (which were shared with the police) but am advised to not post them publically at this point.
On the morning of the 17th of June 2025, I was cycling to work for a meeting. Whilst descending in the direction of Malin Bridge and less than a mile from my house, a car driving on the same road but in the opposite direction, without warning, turned across my path with the intention of turning into a side road. I had almost no time to react. Travelling at just under 30mph (it is a relatively steep hill) when the vehicle initiated its manoeuvre, I was only able to slow to 25mph by the time of impact. I struck the front of the vehicle, rolled onto the bonnet putting my elbow through the windscreen, and landed on the tarmac next to the driver’s door. My bike frame was bent in half and the fork snapped into two pieces, but by sheer luck, I escaped with little more than minor cuts, bruises, and whiplash injuries.
I have been a competitive cyclist for over two decades and am, as my teammates would no doubt testify, no stranger to falling off bikes at high speed. This was different. When you sign on at a road race, you acknowledge and accept the risks. Nobody wants to crash, but in bunch racing it is an inevitability that accidents will happen from time to time, and occasionally they can have serious consequences. When you are casually riding to work, wearing normal everyday clothes and simply trying to go about your everyday life, it seems quite unreasonable that you should have to embrace the same level of danger. Yet, as this event made me all too aware, that is the reality for anyone who dares to adopt anything other than the motor vehicle as their means of transport in South Yorkshire. Since the crash, I have constantly had in the back of my mind how the tiniest change in circumstances could have led to a completely different outcome. What if the car had been an SUV with a higher bonnet, or manoeuvred slightly differently? What if I did not have a bicycle with hydraulic disc brakes or failed to instinctively steer towards the front of the car?
The collision would have been entirely avoided had the driver simply looked before turning into the junction. There was little traffic, the road is almost completely straight, and I certainly would have been in sight for a good few seconds before the manoeuvre was initiated. It having been a bright sunny morning, and the driver travelling in an easterly direction is hard to imagine an occasion where visibility could have been better.
What shocked me most of all however, was not the standard of driving or the rationalisations made by the driver at the time (including the ever too familiar refrain of, “I didn’t see you” in place of the clearly more appropriate “I wasn’t looking”), but the response of South Yorkshire Police. I phoned 101 at the scene. Initially they refused to even record the incident, let alone attend the scene, on the grounds that I wasn’t sufficiently injured. Perhaps acknowledging my protestations during the phone call, they later phoned me back to suggest filing an online report. After waiting a few days with no contact, I phoned to get an update only to be told there was a backlog of several weeks. I waited two months and still no contact, so called again. This time I was told by the operator that road collisions are kept on a separate database and that they could not access it, so gave me the phone number for the appropriate team who only take calls between 10AM and 2PM. This turned out to be untrue; they do not take phone calls at all. You are instead directed to an email address. To give credit to South Yorkshire Police here, they did reply to the email within a day. For the contents of reply email however, I can offer them no such credit. They would not have any involvement on the grounds that the driver left their details and therefore it would all be up to the insurance companies to sort out.
This decision is both demonstrably at odds with legislation, and the highway code. Careless and inconsiderate driving is an offence under section 3 of the 1988 Road Traffic Act, failing to stop, report an accident, and give information or documents is defined under section 170; they are separate offences. If a drink driver stops and is breath tested, they are no less guilty of drink driving than had they refused to give a sample and driven off. Yet, in the opinion of South Yorkshire Police, the same does not hold if the offence is instead one of careless driving that could easily have led to the death of a vulnerable road user. South Yorkshire Police also seem to be wilfully ignorant of the 2022 changes to the highway code and the introduction of the hierarchy of road users. The potential consequences had it been two cars in this incident are not the same as it being a car and a bicycle. It seems unfathomable that they would have chosen to take the same course of action in a collision where one car driver ended up with their arm putting a hole in the other’s windscreen.
These are ultimately operational and political decisions of South Yorkshire Police as evidenced by the vastly different interactions I and others have had following incidents in other counties. I can empathise that, like much of the public sector, South Yorkshire Police are overstretched and underfunded but simply ignoring such offences will not help reduce police workloads. Enforcement is a necessary deterrent to bad driving. If there are no consequences to dangerous driving, people will continue to drive dangerously, and the roads will remain unsafe. There needs to be a change in both South Yorkshire Police’s attitude and policies towards vulnerable road users.
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