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news
Lorry head-on.PNGNear Miss of the Day 651: “If I’d continued to go straight on, I would have gone under the wheels of this lorry”
This may well be the most frightening incident we have ever posted to our Near Miss of the Day series – and one in which the cyclist, who was almost taken out by a lorry driver ignoring stop markings at a junction, while on the wrong side of the road too, happens to be a senior police officer who is committed to making the roads safer for all and is encouraging all cyclists to submit footage of near misses.
Court result: last week I was informed of a court result relating to this incident of dangerous driving. The driver of this HGV was disqualified for this incident from 11 February 2021 pic.twitter.com/PtVggntO5f
— Sheffield North West NPT (@SheffNW_NPT) November 2, 2021
The video was posted to the Twitter account of South Yorkshire Police’s Sheffield Northwest Neighbourhood Policing Team, which is led by Inspector Kevin Smith – the cyclist who filmed the incident, which happened on 11 February this year at the junction of Hoar Stones Road and Mill Lee Road, near the village of Low Bradfield and close to the Strines.
He has been unable to share the video until now due to it being sub judice, but the driver has now been convicted of dangerous driving and given 200 hours of community service and ordered to pay £100 compensation, £85 costs and a £95 victim surcharge, as well as being banned from driving for 12 months and required to take an extended retest afterwards before regaining a driving licence.
He told road.cc: “The circumstances are that it was the first day I’d got back on my bike after a particularly nasty bout of Covid. I was doing a short loop which was extremely hard work.
“On my return I was enjoying the beautiful scenery when I saw the HGV travelling up the hill at some speed. I was planning to turn left anyway, but began to brake based on the speed it approached. The road was still wet and there was still snow on the ground in certain places, so it was somewhat sketchy.
“Fortunately I had scrubbed off enough speed that I was able to put myself into the gap between the lorry and the dry stone wall which was literally centimetres. I did fall off sideways as you can see.
“If I had continued to go straight on, rather than turning left, I would have gone under the wheels of this lorry – just as if I had lost traction and slid off I would again have been underneath.”
“Over the past year I have worked extremely hard to try and improve SYP’s response to dangerous driving, and we are likely to move over to the Nextbase portal this month.
“I am hoping that this will be the biggest step that we have taken to improve consistency and reduce the current system which is very much variable.
“As you’ve reported on, we’ve also been rolling out close pass operations and improving on them to try and make motorists more aware of their responsibility towards vulnerable road users.”
He praised the officer who “did all the hard work” in ensuring the case went to court, and added: “I am all about trying to get everyone the same access to justice I have as a police officer.
“The closer we get to having all cyclists confident of submitting this kind of thing, the safer the roads will be.”
Inspector Smith has been featured on road.cc before, most recently in September this year when Great Britain’s most successful Paralympian, Dame Sarah Storey, who is the active travel commissioner for Sheffield City Region, joined him and other officers on a close pass operation targeting drivers who endanger cyclists – with almost one in five motorists they encountered on their ride pulled over.
> 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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64 comments
Banned from Driving for 12 months!!
But there is a national shortage of HGV drivers so no doubt the Tories will cancel his conviction and expunge the highway code retrospectively to suite their own agenda.
I still think there is little appreciation of how it works in the most cyclist-hostile force areas like Lancashire where they devote astonishing time and effort to not doing anything about offences against cyclists. Good luck to Inspector K- he got a result and is a hero to cyclists and a villain to Lancashire TacOps, where his photo is likely to be the dartboard. If he had submitted that in Lancashire I can say with absolute confidence that there would have been no response and no action at all. A police Inspector could possibly incite action in Lancashire over a close pass, but nobody else can- the former situation is improbable because there is no evidence of any Lancashire officers who can work out which bit of a bike is the top.
What happened about this super-close pass at speed of almost 4 months ago, which also involves crossing the DWL in a dangerous position on a humped main road bridge, was nothing. I wrote several times enquiring about it, with no response. I eventually forced from LC the identity of the officer supposedly responsible, only to receive an automatic reply saying she was 'not on operational duties' and that was that.
'Oh, it's the CPS' is just a dodge used by the police to transfer responsibility for the invariable decision to do nothing from an identifiable officer or officers to a faceless bureaucracy: It's the CPS, Squire! In Lancashire, as in Hertfordshire, apparently, there is no such thing as a close pass. They have never prosecuted anybody for the offence- the single case was mine and they just abandoned it in court and let him take an online joke driving course which was even more trivial than the slightly less joke driving course that he was originally offered and failed to take up.
Well they are right - it isn't a separate offence. We prosecute it as "careless" or "inconsiderate" driving.
An offence of a close pass would be nice but it would doubtless come with some difficulties around measuring distance which hopefully some cycle gear manufacturer may help us with.
S3 road traffic act 1988 if you want to offer them some tips. We also use s59 of the police reform act 2002 where appropriate
Thanks for clearing this up. I assume that leaves close passing open to interpretation of individual police officers as to whether the threshold for S3 is met or not. Can you give us any insight as to what training officers are given in this regard.
Thank you for all you do for us and for contributing on this site. I am very pleased you survived this incident and that it hasn't put you off cycling. I should think many people would never get on a bike again after experiencing this.
I assume that leaves close passing open to interpretation of individual police officers as to whether the threshold for S3 is met or not.
I suspect the trouble is unless the officers have been on a bike and close passed, they don't appreciate how dangerous some of these are, and judging by some close incidents with myself and Police Cars, (and others like Rendel's video), they see it more from the drivers point of view so side that way.
It is no surprise close passing and cyclist video submissions started with Mark and Steve at WMP and is carried into some areas by the likes of Kevin Smith as they are all cyclists so know what it can be like. I suspect the Sarge off the Surrey Twitter is another one as well. Unfortunately most of the rest of the forces are drivers first. The blog from CyclingUK about the response from forces on the close pass mat shows what attitudes were like 5 years or so ago, and whilst they think the forces have been better about it, I suspect most are not judging by WTJS and others experiences around the country. I also think WMP have also slipped well behind when they seemed to quietly remove the Road Harm Reduction Team from a very visible public profile to might hear something once in awhile if you are lucky.
It is possible to get action about careless or inconsiderate driving close-pass in Herts - with some caveats.
I've had some recent sucess with Herts DET, possibly because I started quoting a tweet from BCH RPU in my close-pass incident statement:
The driver was also not confirming to the BCH Roads Policing Unit interpretation of the Highway Code guidelines on passing cyclists safely - “Drivers must allow the width of a car (1.5m) when passing cyclists. Passing too close can have tragic consequences.” [https://twitter.com/roadpoliceBCH/status/1382227180881580032]
All my reports this year have got "appropriate positive action" - a coincidence ?
There is an 80%, or more, chance that this is only a warning (80% is across ALL online reports; from FoI data); and Herts explicitly do not keep the stats of how many out of all reports were ticked as "cyclist close pass", qualifiying the careless or inconsiderate driving report; so I could equally be the only one who has managed to get any action on careless or inconsiderate driving close-pass!.
I think most people on here, including Inspector Kevin, don't appreciate the plight of those of us in an area absolutely determined to not do anything about any offences related to cyclists. The venal Lancashire Constabulary and equally blameworthy PCC Snowden simply ignore really high quality evidence- every case I have submitted gets the video, the slo-mo part video and the .pdf file including the appropriate stills. There is also text when required, but it's difficult to write much about heavy tipper lorries, taxis, Lancashire County Council vehicles, Audi with big caravan etc. etc. crashing through red lights on the A6 at 50+ mph up to 2 seconds after they turned red. None of those offenders have had any action taken against them- even when I have gone through the palaver of providing the formal MG11 form statements, well over a year ago, the cases just disappear and LC just refuses to say what has happened to them. Despite reminders, it is now almost 2 months since I wrote asking about the fate of 4 red light offenders under the same log incident number of July 2020. No response.
I note the company that owns the lorry is based about 11 miles away from the location of the incident. I bet the driver had taken that junction in that way many times before and got away with it. Looked like a classic "must maintain momentum" approach to an uphill junction with a failure to observe properly. I would be interested to know if his employer has taken any action.
And that is why cycling bibs/tights should always be black.
Great skill and nerves to keep upright.
I appreciate your insider knowledge may have helped a bit but any lawyer viewing that should have no problem in getting that guy banned. Absolutely inexcusable driving.
What was his excuse? He didnt see you?
Seeing that brown might be more appropriate
Just 12 months eh. Should be considearably longer, if not lifetime, especially for a 'professional' driver. Also nice of the motorist behind to check if he was ok
When you see someone driving like that you know they are an accident waiting to happen. The fact you avoided him is purely down to you, if you had been going straight on you would almost certainly have been hit. After turning his indicator on I don't think the HGV did anything correctly at that junction.
Wow that is a particularly scary one! The outcome could so easily have been very different.
OK, that wins the close pass series.
Hopefully no one will insure that guy to drive a truck again. Well done SYP for getting him off the road for a year anyway.
That could easily have ended differently had their been a patch of ice in the wrong place. Great result of dangerous driving.
Good result.
As the Inspector says, had he continued straight he'd be dead. I'll add the driver would have claimed he'd overtaken on the left. And been believed....
Great work Insp
Wow - dangerous driving not what we normally see.
Was this because it was an inspector pushing for this and the CPS reckoning as he is an officer, it would stick ?
probably, they are (..or were) held in higher esteem as a witness due to their membership in the club.
Not sure which club you are referring to, as I'm a member of quite a few clubs, although my record club membership did lapse a few years ago.
it definitely helped to have a good knowledge of traffic legislation so I could put in a 4 page statement. I also don't have the same barriers that members of the public have faced when trying to report incidents in the past (barriers I have been working to remove).
The CPS lawyer who authorised the charge went through their rationale in some detail I am told, although I have not viewed their rationale or had any involvement in the case after reporting it as I did not think that would be proper. I've not looked at the incident due to data protection rules and the fact I was the victim. I certainly didn't have any conversations with the CPS although I have been told in the past I make an excellent witness.
That's a great example of "eating your own dog food" and well done on not sliding under the lorry.
I take it that a "good knowledge of traffic legislation" is more than just "they're on the wrong forking side of the road!"
Knowing when to quote the CPS's own guidance and invoke case law helps a bit too
It's fair to say that you knowing the processes thoroughly resulted in the incident being taken very seriously. But it was a serious incident and it's good work for getting an unfit driver off the road. I'd be curious if the guy can get an HGV driving job afterwards. It'd concern me to be honest if he does, but there is a shortage of HGV drivers and I know some companies are a lot less diligent about who they hire than others.
Keep it up
I imagine that this particular driver may have been driving under grandfather rights and only sits a refresher CPC course every 5 years which in this instance has been totally ignored by him. It's most likely when he takes his extended test his new licence will hopefully not have any of the C or D catagories at least that is my hope. He will then have to sit a CPC test before then deciding which catagory he then wishes to pursue. A long and expensive process. It is highly unlikely that this fella will ever have a professional driving job again.
Glad you are OK Inspector Kevin and congratulations on the result and for engaging here. I'm sure you're realistic enough to realise there will be an element of cynicism from the longer-term readership here, given your job and the fact that we're now on Close Pass #651 of this depressing series, none of which (from memory) resulted in a Dangerous Driving charge (yours was bad, but at least you could see them coming - there has been worse on here IMO passing from behind, never mind the actual assaults on cyclists by drivers - most of them seemingly NFA'd by various police forces). Perhaps SYP could let us know, apart from this one, how many charges of Dangerous Driving have been prosecuted by SYP and the CPS on the basis of footage submitted from cyclists?
Why does it "definitely help to have a good knowledge of traffic legislation"? Why is that necessary for a cyclist to make a complaint and have their police take it seriously that their safety has been needlessly endangered? Is that a fair justice system?
To reiterate, I am genuinely delighted you've pursued this case and made the roads safer as a result, I just wish it was an option open to civilians because in most of the country (maybe all of it), it isn't.
Couldn't agree more.
You Meatloafed me.
I wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression- this result was down to the tenacity of PC Liz Wilson who want happy with careless. I was taken aback when CPS agreed with me that it was dangerous driving.
to provide some context we have issued over 100 tickets on close pass ops, and also a good quantity from online submission but this is the only dangerous driving charge we have successfully achieved. I think that is down to the fact that even to a non cyclist this one looks absolutely horrendous and you can easily see how it could have done wrong. To cyclists I think it looks worse
however I think all cyclists have that one moment where they think "that was close". I'd quite like to prosecute those moments and Prevent others from not having the benefit to reflect due to the a fact they weren't as lucky / awesomely skilled (joke) as me
Thanks for replying Kevin. I'm sure PC Wilson and SYP treats every equivalent complaint equally, I just think many here, including myself, probably think that your outcome was more favourable than most on here will have received, at multiple stages, i.e.:
1) Footage/statement goes to another PC/police force without the complainant being a police Inspector -> the evidence of the previous 650 episodes in this series, as well as the lived experience of many on here, is that if the local police force even agree to accept the footage, it would be NFA'd as no injury/police refuse to divulge outcome/"we had stern words with the driver" (not sure anyone believes this actually happens)
2) Similarly with the CPS (as you say, your experience of being a court witness will go in your favour, though I'm not sure that's a comfort to those of us outside the criminal justice system - where does that leave us?). You mention being able to quote the CPS's own guidance and invoke case law, which are abilities a miniscule proportion of complainants will have (and of course, they shouldn't have to. I'd hope you would agree with that.)
3) Even down to the final outcome in court, it's not clear if the driver finally pleaded guilty to DD or if there was a trial, but again the experience of many cyclists/road users and the case reporting of similar/worse cases on this site suggest that things progressed more smoothly in this case likely because of your job (and that is no fault of yours)
e.g.
Very few defendant drivers plead guilty, especially to DD (may plead guilty to careless driving in the hope that the CPS indulge them to avoid a trial, which they often do)
DD is a jury trial, which to many here elsewhere seem skewed against cyclist complaints- just by selection and numbers, juries are likely to consist predominantly of drivers with few, if any, cyclists (plus the constant tabloid media tripe of 'road tax', 'red light jumpers', 'lycra louts' echoing through heads) and likely to accept any defence nonsense (see this case https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/family-cyclist-killed-ro... for an example). However I imagine most jurors would prefer the evidence of a police Inspector (even if they cycle!) over a lorry driver.
Anyway, I've said my piece, I wish you the best for the future and in your efforts to make South Yorkshire safer.
with all due respect there has been nothing I can recall in the previous 650 episodes in this series that has come close to this one in terms of pure risk of harm to the cyclist involved. You could replay that encounter 100s of times, and given those road conditions, the vast majority would nearly all end in some form of KSI, thats how bad it is.
so even with a jury trial, if you cant convince them that driving falls far below the standard expected & that it would be obvious that driving in that way would be dangerous, then theres really no hope at all.
driving a tipper truck at that speed, across a junction on the wrong side of the road, barely indicating at all unless their indicators are really slow, at a cyclist that causes them basically to have to crash into a stone wall to avoid being crushed by the truck, that doesnt fall in the you were driving carelessly & inconsiderately bracket, when theres real risk of actual harm being caused by the standard of driving, its dangerous driving, end of.
so I know we often complain here about submissions that end up with warnings or NFAs, all of mine for nearly the past 18months now have ended up that way and no Im not particularly happy about that as it feels like weve gone backwards in some respects, even if all the hurdles to submit stuff are removed, it feels like its a big waste of time if nothing is done with it.
but Id still believe if anyone submitted anything like that video above to any police force in the UK, they would prosecute it to the full extent of the law, whoever that submission came from.
"Id still believe if anyone submitted anything like that video above to any police force in the UK, they would prosecute it to the full extent of the law, whoever that submission came from."
We'll have to disagree on that - the links below were all vile and no apparent substantive police action.
https://road.cc/content/news/near-miss-day-627-close-passes-over-solid-w...
https://road.cc/content/news/nmotd-637-cyclist-receives-very-fast-and-cl...
https://road.cc/content/news/near-miss-day-604-two-close-passes-successi...
https://road.cc/content/news/267179-near-miss-day-311-aggressive-close-pass
https://road.cc/content/news/259372-near-miss-day-271-coach-drivers-clos...
https://road.cc/content/news/near-miss-day-619-driver-gets-stern-talking...
https://road.cc/content/news/nmotd-634-close-pass-sign-urging-give-cycli...
https://road.cc/content/news/near-miss-day-618-morrisons-lorry-driver-cl...
I could add many more
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