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Today’s Near Miss of the Day is slightly unusual as the driver involved is a learner under instruction who close passes a cyclist riding in, what can be best described as, an utterly terrible ‘murder strip’ cycle lane.
Learning to drive is stressful, nervy and difficult, so it’s only fair to show, as road.cc reader Martin did here, calmness and direct any issues to the instructor.
What followed was a well-made point about giving vulnerable road users 1.5m space (even if they’re in a ‘cycle lane’), an apology and a promise that the situation will be reviewed with the learner. Refreshingly undramatic…
“I don’t think I was out of order to chase this driver down,” Martin told us. “I wouldn’t normally do this, but I figured a driving instructor was maybe less likely to turn violent.
“The cycle lane here is an absolute waste of paint and unless I ride over the drain gratings my bar end is over the line. Then there’s the junction which requires attention and then thinking ahead to the mini roundabout where I normally turn right, so I was caught off-guard by the passing car and even more annoyed to see it was a driving school vehicle.
“I followed this up with an email as it was rather easy to track down the instructor and got a sort of acknowledgement and apology so I decided not to take it any further. Hopefully he will no longer advise his clients that the 1.5m highway code advice is optional in the event of an oncoming vehicle.”
Martin followed up the incident with an email asking the instructor to ensure students keep a safe passing distance and received the following reply: “Thank you for this. I’ve taken it on board and reviewed the situation with my learner. All the best. Sorry about this!”
Anecdotally speaking, we can’t recall having too many (if any) incidents of dangerous driving from learner drivers. Maybe we’re just extremely fortunate, and maybe there aren’t enough learner drivers on the road for us to notice, or maybe we’ve sympathetically erased them from memory… but what’s your experience sharing the roads with driving instructors and students? Normally pretty good?
> 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 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
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