Last night’s BBC regional news programme Inside Out South highlighted research from the Near Miss Project run by Dr Rachel Aldred of the University of Westminster which found that on average, cyclists experienced one “very scary” near miss a week, on average.
> BBC regional news segment asks ‘how close is too close?’
Here’s a video from road.cc reader Paul Downs that starkly illustrates that point. Given an action camera for his birthday in 2015, he began filming his 20-mile each way commute in Norfolk.
“Most of it's pretty quiet, but not all of it, as the video shows,” he told us, with the footage in the video above shot in the space of just three months between September and December 2015.
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.
