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news
Near miss of the day 28: Driver turns across cyclist at speed
Today’s near miss sees a white Audi overtake at speed on a 30mph dual carriageway before turning left from the outside lane, narrowly avoiding a collision with a cyclist. Although the footage was brought to their attention, Greater Manchester Police are said not to have investigated as there was no complaint from the cyclist.
The incident took place in late June on Chester Road in Old Trafford at the junction with Great Stone Road.
Andy, who sent us the video, said it was taken from the dash cam of a close family member as she was driving home from work.
“As a responsible citizen and with nothing to gain from this herself she sent the video to the police as they have recently publicised an initiative/campaign to make the roads safer for cyclists as part of Operation Considerate.
“We heard nothing back from the police, so I contacted Operation Considerate myself last week and was told the case was not going to be further investigated as the cyclist had not come forward.
“There were no issues with the quality of the footage or identifying the registration number of the car – it was simply that they had been given guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service not to even send cases to them for prosecution where there was no complaint from the person actually affected by the incident, i.e. in this case the unidentified cyclist.
“I was also told that they don't re-contact people who send these videos in unless they are to be called to court, so we would never have been told about this if I'd not got in touch.
“We were not happy with this decision. Not only did the footage show a blatantly dangerous bit of driving but it also seems that the police have failed to send out a Notice of Intended Prosecution to the driver so any opportunity to prosecute is now effectively lost as they have not complied with correct procedure.”
Andy went on to say that he had recently reported a separate close pass incident to a neighbouring police force which was dealt with “professionally and thoroughly.” He added that the bad driving in that particular incident, “was much less appalling than the one in the attached video.”
Greater Manchester Police has been contacted for comment.
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.
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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36 comments
Undeniably dangerous driving and threatening life with a lethal weapon not discounting attempted murder. Isn't this what cops would charge anyone that that swung a baseball bat at a victim narrowly missing their head. So cops, what's the difference here? The driver also caused the witness alarm and distress a crime that cops could have followed up against the the driver if they were too chicken to charge the other serious crimes.
a positive would be the driver is identifying themselves as the driver a negative is that change only comes with cultural pressure and political will - both are lacking
I'll back up on to this series to push my agenda to rename "punishment pass" as:
"punishment pass AKA coward's pass" use it and hope it catches on
It's only a matter of time before the actual alleged near-misser themselves sues a site like this for besmirching their good name. Given civil evidential limits are lower than criminal ones, it's quite possible.
Doesn't seem at all likely to me. There's no libel in posting video of someone's behaviour in an unequivocally public place, as far as I know.
And would any of these drivers want to draw even more attention to their behaviour, leading to an even more obvious web-footprint, complete with their name attached?
And libel actions cost quite a bit of money to bring. Seems an absurdly high risk to take in response to relatively obscure stories that don't even include their names or anything google-able.
Not sure about the 'near miss' series itself or what it's supposed to achieve. Starting to think the main thing it does is reveal how reluctant the police are to ever act on such cases...and thus demonstrate the futility of expecting legal enforcement to work as a means of making cycling more attractive.
How is posting a video of someone doing something libellous? I imagine that the websites will be fairly careful with the article that accompanies the video.
I know the person who took the dashcam footage. She was quite concerned at the time about the disregard shown by the driver for the welfare of other road users, in this case primarily the cyclist rather than herself. Since it seemed to her to be unambiguously a case of inconsiderate driving she felt that submitting footage of it to "Operation Considerate" was an appropriate thing to do.
Speaking personally, I'd be interested to know why the cyclist not reporting the incident is sufficient reason for not taking the matter further. It's unlikely the cyclist was able to take down the numberplate himself, and, even if he had been able to, he would surely have known that it would be his word against the driver's unless he had himself obtained video evidence of what happened, which his failure to come forward does in itself make very unlikely.
A far more important point, I think, is that stipulating that the cyclist needed to have made a complaint himself for further action to be taken suggests a questionable logic in the fundamental rationale behind the initiative: are initiatives like "Operation Considerate" designed solely to give individuals on the receiving end of bad driving the opportunity to obtain some kind of personal redress if (and only if) they themselves want it, or are they designed to discourage bad driving in general for the benefit and safety of all road users?
The driver's behaviour looks dangerous to me, and possibly he makes a habit of driving like that. A word in his ear by the right people, i.e. the police, might just save another road user in the future from actual harm, rather than a near miss.
Unfortunately in my experience the police will do anything rather than prosecute a driver who has endangered a cyclist and will invent any excuse to avoid their responsibilities. When you say the right people are the police for a word in the ear of a careless driver this is true in theory but in practice many officers share the same contempt of the criminal driver for the vulnerable cycling victim.
These "near miss of the day" articles: is it me or are they more and more just looking like an average commute? I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing, just that I'm really *really* not sure what they're supposed to be achieving any more...
Expect a series of longer running videoes - commute of the day - coming to Road.cc soon!
Quite. We're on #28, all of which show that at some point, if you cycle enough, you'll be victim of some bad driving and there's generally little you can do about it. 99.9% of the time cycling is event free in my experience.
I'm chuffed for you sweetpea.
EDIT: And if I get this right, you don't understand something, or don't get the humour, you assume that it's wrong and needs correcting.
Go for a ride in you GB replica kit babes.
@jh27 Ok then if you are that troubled about the knife thing, make it a metal 2 inch pipe waved by a guy with Swartzeneger muscles. Or without a pipe at all really, if I start pretending that I am going to punch or kick and old lady outside police headquarters, I am sure I will be arrested. If I make the same manoeuvre this guy did with my Audi or my BMW again outside the police headquarters nothing will probably happen.
I'm sure that many heart surgeons save children from cancer by driving recklessly.
The driver never had a chance of seeing the cyclist or any pedestrians who may have crossing the side road. Is this less worse than:
Driving slightly over the drink/drug limit?
Driving a few MPH over the limit?
Driving whilst disqualified?
Driving without insurance?
The reason given for no further action, was reportedly that the cyclist didn't come forward. How is that a good reason?
NB they are not reported as saying that the number plate was not visible (the original may have been better quality). Nor are they reported as saying they are concentrating their resources on more serious cases. Nor are they reported as saying that there is insufficient evidence.
The offence is "Dangerous Driving." - they have a video which shows driving and complete disregard for anyone's safety. It's been handed to them on a plate.
* I am well aware that they might well have said all these thing, and it didn't get reported - I'm not aware of any requirement for journalists to tell the whole truth - or even any truth.
Your arguments are entirely spurious and speculative. There is no way at all you can say with any clarity whatsoever what the driver could and could not see. You don't know what position they held on the road previously, what their sight lines were, or what their skill level or frame of reference was (driving that may appear reckless or dangerous to a bystander suddenly may become of far less concern when it is discovered ,for example, that it was a highly skilled pursuit driver rushing a donor organ to a recipient.)
Before you chase off down the rabbit hole arguing the specific, let me be perfectly clear. I agree this looks like atrocious, dangerous driving, that if taken a half second later could have had catastrophic consequences. However, no harm came of it, and so far as I know, the police are only bound to investigate it if someone involved lays a formal complaint. On the surface of it, it is a very minor incident which involved a cyclist having to brake briefly which caused no injury, so the police may have decided that within the remit of that day's workload, that there really wasn't any point diverting resources to it. Of course the original video may have been better quality, but that is entirely speculative. It might not have been better quality, which makes perfect sense of the response from the police.
My point about the heart surgeon was in response to Don Simon's perjorative "probably an undercover cop car " being the reason they wouldn't / haven't investigate. I was simply making an equally ridiculous assumption about the occupation of the driver. And yes, it wouldn't be the first surgeon who had driven rather faster than they should to get as quickly as possible to an emergency situation.
Who's making all the bloody complaints when people get caught by speed cameras?
Going the wrong way for Christies.
What evidence?
Incorrect, actually going exactly towards Christies.
Are you really that fucking pathetic?
You seem to have a bee under your bonnet. Am I wrong?
You seem to following me around like a sad sack, with some sort of wanker agenda. It didn't end well for dinosaurjr. don't go the same way.
Go follow someone else, little boy.
I'm hardly following you around, you seem to have a slight ego issue. I am a long running poster on road.cc and there are only a few new articles a day. I call out BS/lies/errors when I see them and most of them are eminating from your keyboard in the last few days. Unless you believe your previous comment constituted a 'joke' in which case it missed it's mark; rather like your knowledge of Manchester geography. I see the other thread has kicked off again; there are plenty of others to pull you up on your cow chutney there. I'm not quite sure why you become so irate at others contradicting you, but if there is one thing Trump has taught us its how to spot a narcissist.
Really there's nothing there for the cops to act on. The car number plate doesn't appear visible, the cyclist just had to brake briefly. The plods don't have unlimited resources, and this really is at about the lowest end of things they might have to cover on any given watch. It could have been catastrophic, but then again so could many many other things that happened that day. And, no, if you murdered someone and no-one complained, you wouldn't get away with it, just as if this driver had hit the cyclist and killed them the cops would have investigated even if no-one had complained.
And Don Simon? You have a really really low evidential threshold. I think it's far more likely that it was a heart surgeon racing to get to the hospital to save a child with cancer myself.
So are you saying that makes it acceptable?
Of course I'm not saying that makes it acceptable. It highlights how random, baseless and ridiculous the honest opinion is that it's an undercover plod car (presumably because plod haven't investigated it)
No, sorry, fair enough (posted before thinking, really)
That's a dangerous overtake of the car with the dash camera, by the Audi...so should the police not be investigating that (as the cyclist not complaining is rather a moot point)...
Police driving unmarked Audi imho.
Looks worth the police having a quiet word with the driver at least. If they are driving like that someone might get very hurt very soon.
Plod only gets involved if they can prosecute, quiet words are no longer given, according to my local police when I presented them with video evidence.
Presumably not considered an economic use of their time. Oh, and it wouldn't show up in the figures.
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