Near Miss of the Day 515: Aggressive and abusive van driver gets the sack

I am suspicious this is a con-job by the company, although I may be over-cynical. Was the video clip provided to the company? If not, they're lying and the driver is still there. The complaint should always be made to the police, even when you know they're going to file it in the bin, as Lancashire Constabulary will probably do with this one where Mercedes Van ) LM09 LGM crashed through the lights almost 2 seconds after they turned red

I hope this behaviour was also reported to police and not just the company. The driver can be sacked, but without action that impacts on their ability to drive they're free to continue to drive for another employer, now with an even bigger chip on their shoulder since a cyclist cost them their job. It may have just made them more dangerous.

I went through a phase of contacting companies to report bad driving. In general the responses were good with companies saying they would try to identify the driver and "have a word". I never got any follow up reports, and I wouldn't really expect to. The trouble is it's difficult to tell real concern from PR. Maybe I should go back to doing it and make it a New Years resolution.

The only poor response was from DPD who told me that they couldn't identify a driver based on me giving them the exact road, date and time. This seems more than unlikely but is poor from them, because even if it was true a good quality system would collate this information as part of their KPIs. What it says is that they don't consider road safety to be a performance criteria or if they do their data only looks at more quantitative information (eg accidents, parking fines, speeding tickets).

Christ, overtook the other vehicle in a 20, just to have a go at you. Well done, and well done to the company. He deserved it- did you also put it into the police?

It's about time all 20 limits were made no-overtaking too, for my two penneth

Hmm, seems pretty similar to an incident i had recently with a van from a local plumbing company, although in that instance I got aneven closer pass and lot more abuse than this - including the driver getting out to tell me that if he saw me again he run me over.

When I called the company, they said "we can't supervise our drivers while they're on the road". Nice.

Now being investigated by the police. And I told the company that I would very much hold them responsible for how they responded to the incident. Since sharing the footage with them, have had precisely no further response - so you can look forward to seeing their business being prominently advertised in association with that footage once the investigation is concluded.

Whilst I welcome the action, the fact the driver "has done this before and had been disciplined and warned against doing so in the future.". Done what? Abused cyclists whilst illegally driving or other things. Nasty dent in the side of the van for example. 

Very impressed that the company took proper and appropriate action. I've pretty much given up asking companies to do anything as they always say they're dealing with it but can't tell me what they've done for data protection reasons - or like Jewson, when a lorry thundered out of the mist (5M visibility max) at me on Hartside pass and came so close that one of its straps hit me across the helmet, deny they had a lorry in the area at the time (this was in my pre camera days). Refreshing to see a company taking proper action.

Wow. I was wondering when the van would appear...

That was really stupid driving.