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news
Near Miss of the Day 860: Van driver almost takes cyclist out — business owner threatens defamation case after getting review bombed
A cyclist was pedalling down Brighton Road in south London when a driver with a business van hooked left and cut across him with a dangerously high speed, and when the cyclist posted the video leading to the business getting review bombed, its response was more threatening than apologetic…
The Croydon-based cyclist, who goes by the name of CycleGaz onTwitter, is a cycling campaigner and frequently documents cycling in London (‘the good times and bad’).
The incident took place in August last year, when he was cycling on the (wait for it) cycle lane in Brighton Road. As he was about to reach the junction at Riddlesdown Road opposite the Royal Oak Centre, a lorry van swerved to take a wider line and maintain higher speed before cutting across left in front of CycleGaz.
CycleGaz had to slam down on his disc brakes, which left marks on his tyre. He said: “If I was not hyperaware, on a bike with hydraulic disc brakes, and extremely experienced at using said brakes, this would have resulted in a collision that would have left me with serious injuries.”
He told road.cc that he had reported it via the Met police website and received a standard response after a few days that a Notice of Intended Prosecution had been sent to the registered keeper of the vehicle. When he requested an update in March, he was informed that only a Driving Awareness Course had been issued to the driver.
This is what I'm worried about. The junction needs to be fixed so nobody gets hurt!
— CycleGaz™ (@cyclegaz) April 12, 2023
Yup, was planning on carrying on around, not turn left.
— CycleGaz™ (@cyclegaz) April 12, 2023
I wouldn’t be. My partner was was crashed into (in her car) side on by a vehicle running a red light. She needed to be cut out and required surgery. Driver got awareness course. But on the same junction there’s a camera that if you go over the white line a fraction, 3 points £90
— Mark Brotherhood (@MTBrotherhood) April 12, 2023
One reply also pointed out that his heart rate, which is visible in the video, jumped to 146BPM after the close pass, increasing from the 129BPM when he was cycling, despite a pause in the physical effort.
Amidst all this, the business to whom the lorry belonged has got caught up. After CycleGaz posted the video on social media, eagle-eyed viewers were quick to point that the van belonged to a certain Carpet Supplies, and thus began the exercise of review bombing, despite CycleGaz requesting people not to do it.
This post is intended to highlight the poor actions of the Met Police and to flag the dangerous junction.
Please do not contact or review the company in question.
— CycleGaz™ (@cyclegaz) April 12, 2023
> Near Miss of the Day 859: Driver cuts across cyclist at speed, narrowly misses front wheel
However, the business instead took a quite interesting approach, threatening the reviewers with defamation cases.
Under one one-star review, it said: “We kindly request you remove this false review in relation to the flooring business, you have not purchased or received any service from the company.
“Your comment is in regards to a closed civil matter and not to the services that carpet supplies limited have offered. Should the review not be removed the review and your details will be included in the defamation case being raised against the individual who posted the video should he not remove it from all online platforms as requested.”
However, CycleGaz has denied that he received any information of a defamation case from the business owner.
> 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
Adwitiya joined road.cc in 2023 as a news writer after completing his masters in journalism from Cardiff University. His dissertation focused on active travel, which soon threw him into the deep end of covering everything related to the two-wheeled tool, and now cycling is as big a part of his life as guitars and football. He has previously covered local and national politics for Voice Cymru, and also likes to write about science, tech and the environment, if he can find the time. Living right next to the Taff trail in the Welsh capital, you can find him trying to tackle the brutal climbs in the valleys.
Latest Comments
- Rendel Harris 14 min 41 sec ago
And a Happy Christmas to you, road.cc staff!
- Rendel Harris 1 hour 2 min ago
The odds of not being able to find a single pedestrian - just one, note, "any pedestrian" - in an area containing more than about ten of them who...
- Bungle_52 1 hour 21 min ago
It's actually not too bad at the moment. I suspect the shared sections will become a nightmare in summer though. It stops before it gets into the...
- bikeman01 2 hours 41 min ago
I love how wannabe racer reviewers talk about fork flex under braking like their tyres are made of glue. I find traction gives long before fork flex.
- eburtthebike 2 hours 45 min ago
All children should be locked in their rooms with a playstation to avoid causing a nuisance to the NIMBYs, curmudgeons and gammons. When they get...
- hawkinspeter 3 hours 48 min ago
They don't make them like they used to
- LongitudeLatitude 4 hours 39 min ago
Thanks for using my picture of chocolate in your opening picture. The original can be found here, chocolate! | LongitudeLatitude | Flickr.
- lesterama 5 hours 6 min ago
Fair comments. I'll put my hands up and say I got the wrong end of the stick with this one. ¡Feliz navidad! Here's a pic for the season of goodwill.
- Mike Holmes 5 hours 10 min ago
A trip down memory lane (or street) for me - Harry Quinn's bike shop was at the top of our Street and I used to spend time staring at the bikes and...
- Bigtwin 5 hours 26 min ago
Because people aren't buying those cars. They are effecively renting them on PCPs or via companies. The bike market doesn't work like that.
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42 comments
Aggressive, dangerous driving and then an aggressive reaction again when it's published online. Perhaps the driver is also the owner, despite the claims otherwise.
The driver appears to be swan-necking to gain advantage of speed before turning left. There's a lot to suggest that the van driver is aggrieved at the altered road layout which has been designed to reduce speeds entering the side road by deflecting traffic further along the main road, effecting a 90 turn, and posting a lower speed limit into the new road to encourage safer roads. And that's regardless of whether they saw the cyclist or not, which they are obligated to give priority to regardless of eyes on or not. The driver actually increases the blind spot area on the left.
What is off-putting isn't just behaviour like this but the lacksidiasical response from the police.
I would advise:
Try to increase view into the van to see what the driver is doing (digital enhancement),
A formal complaint against the decision not to have this sent to court.
The roads are not going to be safer if drivers behave like this when they appear to be circumventing every measure to make the roads safer and get a minimal response.
Just a thought - if you invite reviews on your website, don't get arsey when they aren't all favourable? If drive like a c@nt, or employ someone else that does, suck it up when you get caught. Or is motornormativity taking over, again?
I don't want to defend this company, with their psychopathic driver and ridiculously defensive manager, but the bad reviews are coming on Google, not the company website, and there's no way to stop them (AFAIK) unless you ask Google to remove your business profile in its entirety or mark it as permanently closed, which would be commercial suicide.
Plus I think review bombing is wrong anyway, and could be classed as a form of online harassment that certainly would be legally open to a challenge.
It almost certainly goes against Googles T&Cs for leaving reviews so opens those engaging in such behaviour to their accounts being blocked or deleted by Google in response
Maybe, depends what the review says I would think. If it says or implies, falsely, that the reviewer is a customer and dissatisfied with the service, then I would agree. If it says clearly that the reviewer is not a customer but has become aware of potentially dangerous driving by a company representative, and that the company's response of threatening legal action does not inspire confidence, and all that is factually accurate, doesn't seem wrong to me. All businesses have to take responsibility for the actions of their employees.
Googles policies do state reviews not based on quality of goods or services received, falls under misinformation and is against their T&Cs.
The business involved can flag all those reviews to be removed.
OK fair enough on the Google T&C aspect, wasn't aware of that. I still don't think it is wrong or harassment though.
The best way for a business to deal with review bombing is to be transparent; explain what happened and how the business dealt with the offending employee.
S/he did mention in their reponse to some bad reviewers, and also on Twitter, that the employee had in fact been sacked as a direct result of their driving. I'm not defending the driving in any way, I regularly submit videos to the police myself, but I don't think this sort of targeted harassment is justified or achieves anything and it makes the cycling community look petty. Note that CycleGaz himself specifically asked people not to review bomb the business. If the driver was the owner and had come out saying I've done nothing wrong, it's all the cyclist's fault, then fire at will but I don't think it's justified in this case; assuming that it's true that the driver has been sacked it's hard to see what else the owner's supposed to do and I don't think they deserve to have their business damaged because of it. That's not to say the owner's response isn't pretty heavy handed and rather silly itself.
Looking at Google all the negative reviews have been removed now anyway.
That was a bad one. The driver was lucky to get away with just a driver improvement course. I know that section of road well. People shouldn't drive so quickly there.
If the business owner is wanting to stop negative comments, all they're going to achieve is more of them with this action. A simple statement on the website saying the driving issue has been addressed would be more effective from their perspective.
The driver was lucky to get away with just a driver improvement course
Or, alternatively, you say the driver was unlucky that he didn't commit the offence in Lancashire where such offences are invariably (I'm not writing 'almost invariably' because it is actually invariably in my experience) ignored with no response at all. These carpet companies seem to employ bad drivers routinely and Lancashire certainly ignored this one. The aim of many police forces is to dismiss such offences with as little effort as possible, if they can't think of a way to blame the cyclist for the offence. My view is that most people who think they have caused 'action to be taken' are taken in by all the police dodges and the best they can hope for is the joke warning letter- most, if not all, of those action letters will declare that they're not going to tell you which of the options was actually inflicted on the driver.
The business owner claimed to be suing the video uploader for defamation; what a clown - I wouldn't use their business based on the stupidity of the owner.
"Given the response it should be standard that the officers of the company are also obliged to attend the course. That would be some real executive accountability, leading to better leadership."
Ionpfrb, What an excellent idea. H&S executive should be enabled to enforce it.
That was a bad pass!
I've had similar experiences myself and now, when a cycle lane, or road, sweeps left via a junction and I want to stay right I indicate right to let others know that I don't intend to turn. It's saved my ass a couple of times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ0DSPpB7vM
Black belt barrister's take on this.... he thinks the driver got off very lightly.
Thanks for posting that, definitely worth watching.
Interesting watch. I also watched his one - on the sidebar - about close passing while the cyclist is in a cycle lane.
You mean the one I highlighted in the Edinburgh close pass clip 😉
Maybe so...
On the defamation, I read it as the business owner saying that a review rating should be about the quality of their carpet laying - and therefore marking on the basis of what their driving is inaccurate and defamatory.
It would be quite interesting to see what a court would make of it. Personally, I think saying - I have seen how this company's employees treat vulnerable road users, and therefore would recommend not using them - is a legitimate review.
I agree. Don't review their flooring but go onto their website and review their driving. That way there is no defamation. Be polite, post a link to the video .
Absolutely, if you lie and say this company's carpet services are rubbish when you haven't used or experienced them that is defamatory. If you say this company employs or employed a dangerous driver who could quite easily kill someone, that's quite clearly the truth and the owner would get laughed out of court if he tried to take an action on defamation grounds.
There aren't any reviews as such - people have just given them a 1 star rating on Google Maps without posting a comment. I wouldn't fancy trying to prosecute a defamation case! It's even more hopeless if it's against CyclingGaz. It's just bullshit bullying tactics.
Ta - I think people should explain why they've given a one star review.
Amongst other things:
1. The review comments are based on truth (that the companies vehicles have been driven dangerously) which is an active defence and likely easily shown.
2. Fair comment/honest opinion would probably apply (a reasonable person believes based on (what they legitimately believe is) true evidence that the companies vehicles are driven dangerously). If anything the sheer number of negative reviews makes this defence easy.
3. Gaz (who they are claiming they will persue) didn't make any claims against the business; He made claims against the driver and supplied video; So he didn't defame the Business. Claims should be against each reviewer. I expect this would drastically limit damages, as while the reviews as a whole damage the business I doubt each individual review would be found to cause that much harm. (The difference between the BBC/Times/Daily Mail saying something and Bob the plumber from the end of the street who has 50 followers on twitter...).
If anything I suspect the business would be opening themselves up to counter claims (they made allegations against Gaz...)
Terrifying - got a hit of adrenalin just watching that.
I am not legally qualified to give this advice but - if it happened it's not defamation. YouTube would be a pretty empty place if every video that someone didnt like had to be taken down.
What they should be doing is saying to their employee - you nearly killed someone today, that's not the look we want for our business, here's your p45 or final written warning.
Such incredible reactions from Gaz there.
In the ridiculous environment where it was defamatory and not factual evidence of terrible infrastructure and even worse driving, I am pretty sure the Streisand Effect has begun
Drive shit. Get banged.
Process it. Be responsible.
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