Today’s instalment of our Near Miss of the Day series unfortunately comes from a National Cycle Network route.
The series highlights the poor standard of driving and dangerous behaviour cyclists face on Britain’s roads. Our latest update comes from road.cc reader Tom Swift (we presume no relation to Ben and Conor) who has sent us footage of his journey on the 30th November along NCN Route 23, near Winchester. Unfortunately, the footage contains two incidents that Hampshire Police, through their Operation SNAP portal, chose not to act upon.
“For both incidents I’ve had a response via email saying No Further Action will be taken as “no clear offence has been identified that will have a realistic prospect of conviction if challenged at court”” Tom writes.
“I find this quite disappointing. I thought the overtake in the first incident [from the second car in the video] was at least careless driving and could easily have resulted in a head-on collision.
“In the second incident I thought the offence of failure to obey a “Keep Left” sign was very clear. I’m less bothered about that one – the driver did at least overtake me with plenty of room, but I would have thought it deserved a warning letter.”
We’re inclined to agree.
> 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“>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