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news
Driver mounts pavement and ploughs through cycle rack on Upper Clapton Road, London (999 London)Driver “spoken to” but not arrested by police after mounting pavement and ploughing through cycle rack, injuring cyclist and snapping bike in two in shocking crash
A motorist who veered off the road and mounted the pavement, slamming into a row of parked bikes, was “spoken to” but not arrested by police following the shocking incident, which left a female cyclist requiring hospital treatment for “non-life threatening injuries”.
The bizarre crash, footage of which has been posted on social media, took place on Sunday morning on Upper Clapton Road in Hackney, east London, at around 10.40am.
In the CCTV footage, the driver of a silver BMW can be seen travelling in the left-hand lane, before suddenly veering off the road and onto the footpath, colliding with a set of cycle racks containing two Lime hire bikes.
Happened on Upper Clapton E5 yesterday.
🎥 Video Credits: @999London pic.twitter.com/emYSd5E3ns— In Stamford Hill (@instamfordhill) September 23, 2024
The motorist mows through the ‘cycle park’ before hitting a woman, who was seemingly locking her own bike to one of the stands, throwing her into the air and across the pavement, while breaking her bike in two in the process.
The driver then comes to a stop a few yards away on the footpath, as passers-by rush to help the stricken cyclist. London Ambulance Service confirmed that a woman was treated by an ambulance crew at the scene and taken to a London trauma centre as a priority, where her injuries were later revealed to have been non-life threatening.
While the clip of the incident has sparked speculation on social media surrounding the circumstances that led to the crash, one resident, who lives on the road, told road.cc that locals believe that the motorist may have “passed out” at the wheel, before suddenly waking up after they had ploughed through the bike stands and striking the cyclist.
According to the resident, who witnessed the scene of the collision a few hours after it took place, also said that the Lime Bikes stationed at the ‘cycle park’ were flattened and that the cyclist’s bike was “snapped in half”.
As of Thursday morning, the cyclist’s lock and helmet remained at the scene, along with the destroyed bike stands, though the bikes have since been removed.
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police told road.cc that the BMW driver was not arrested in the wake of the collision, but merely “spoken to”.
“Police were called at around 10.40hrs on Sunday, 22 September to reports of a road traffic collision,” the Met spokesperson said. “A car collided with a female pedestrian. She was taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
“The driver of the car was spoken to by police. They were not arrested.”
While locals have attributed the crash to the driver allegedly passing out at the wheel, the lack of police action – and the incident itself – is strikingly similar to a shocking collision which took place earlier this year in Norwich, when the driver of a Ferrari lost control of his sports car on a city centre road with a 20mph limit, before mounting the kerb and smashing into a bike rack.
CCTV footage of the crash showed the moment Ross Mendham, a former Dragon’s Den contestant and son of former Norwich City footballer Peter Mendham, left the road on Norwich’s Rose Lane, hitting and destroying the roadside bike racks which prevented him ploughing across a protected cycleway and onto the pavement.
However, despite narrowly missing two pedestrians and a runner in the shocking high-speed crash, Norfolk Police later confirmed that nobody had been injured or arrested for their role in it.
Mendham did, however, appear in court two days later, not in relation to a driving offence, but for having breached his bail conditions after being accused of knocking his pregnant girlfriend unconscious with a punch to the face, the trial for which is set to take place in 2026.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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41 comments
Will someone tell Si Richardson of GCN that the cycling casualty statistics for GB are only useful when you have run out of toilet rolls! A year ago Si gleefully announced how much safer our roads are, according to the statistics😡
Also the issue that a cyclist in the back of an ambulance being treated isn't giving evidence.
So if the driver claims the rider jumped off the footway, guess what is being recorded in stats 19... That the rider was travelling on a road where the footway only just started and is covered in debris so can easily show that they must have been on the road a few 100m back and if they were going to ride illegally on the footway they would have no reason not to continue riding illegally on the footway...
The only road user with a lower rate of recorded contributory factors than cyclists is busses;
But busses insurance payouts etc tend to match police records on contributory factors IIRC (sorry, can't find source for that anymore) (basically every bus has CCTV and drivers know lying about what happened gets them fired, while driver error is usually retraining), while cyclists are significantly more likely to be found to have no negligence...
If it wasn't negligence then what was it?
"just one of those things". The driver "just didn't see you". Which apparently isn't negligent....
Eight minutes for a drug wipe. Though a positive can come through quicker if very +ve.
If it was a genuine medical emergency for the driver I think I can understand them not being arrested but there has to be some form of action to stop them driving at least in the short term!
There does seem to be a spate of people with no medical history of "passing out" but then do so while committing some crime while driving. Then miraculously the condition goes away and their fitness to be licensed to drive is never questioned.
It's the excuse you use as an alternative to 'the sun was in my eyes'
Wimbledon school crash? Spontaneous onset one-off epilepsy event, bookended by total amnesia.
Wimbledon school crash? Spontaneous onset one-off epilepsy event, bookended by total amnesia
And the driver was in a large posh car, if I remember correctly ?Range Rover, which always impresses the police that said driver is 'respectable'. Jag F-Pace BK69 UZD yesterday- no MOT for 3 weeks, and likely to continue without MOT for several months more because the police don't like to bother such people. First reported to OpSnap at 15:15 14.9.24 as reference APL149451 (for those who think I must be reporting them all incorrectly). If Lancashire Constabulary could have barred me from OpSnap they would have done, for the crime of wasting police time by reporting offences they most definitely don't want to know about, but they can't because it's a national portal not under LC control- so they just ignore the reports and offences. Wow! these police officers are such smart dudes!
That's true - if it weren't for the incompetence paradox. Commonly accepted in courts this means you can use your incompetence as a driver as a defense or mitigation - without that actually being an aggravating factor. Or the need for you to return to face another careless / inconsiderate driving charge.
OTOH they could just use the "Scottish defense" (apparently also used for a long time elsewhere in the UK; in other contexts the "Murdoch response") whereby you say you have no memory of / don't recall the incident in question. Why give more detail that someone could pick you up on? Let others worry about what actually happened and why.
It seems the jury very often put the best possible interpretation on this. Or at least are not impressed by the prosecution apparently harrassing another normal driver like themselves, who was making a vital trip from A to B with no intention of doing harm to anyone. Works astonishingly well...
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