Near Miss of the Day 880: Bin lorry driver squeezes cyclist into kerb
The latest video in our Near Miss of the Day series shows the moment the driver of a refuse lorry in Exeter made an extremely close pass on a cyclist – squeezing him into the kerb, and as you can see from the footage, the rider came very close to colliding with a woman walking on the pavement.
As Chris, the road.cc reader who found himself on the receiving end of the dangerous overtake points out, the driver immediately turned left – ignoring a pedestrian who was waiting to cross the side road, and who has priority under the changes made to the Highway Code early last year.
Chris submitted the footage of the incident, which happened on Old Tiverton Road, to Devon & Cornwall Police’s Operation Snap portal but has heard nothing back.
He also lodged a complaint with Exeter City Council (ECC), but when road.cc contacted them for a comment they said that the vehicle had nothing to do with them.
“The vehicle in the video is NOT an ECC vehicle,” the local authority told us. “It is likely to be a trade waste vehicle from a privately run company.”
The council provided pictures of its vehicles, shown below, and noted that after reviewing the video, “the vehicle in the footage is very different in a number of ways,” namely that it has “a different width chassis,” that the council has “orange bin lifts on the reverse of all our vehicles,” and that “all our vehicles are liveried up on BOTH sides as per the pictures.”
The council added that with the vehicle apparently turning into Stadium Way, which gives access to Exeter City FC’s St James Park ground, “whoever is running this lorry may be picking up trade waste at the football club.”
> Near Miss of the Day turns 100 - Why do we do the feature and what have we learnt from it?[1]
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[2] 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[3]