Near Miss of the Day 366: Stop-start pedestrian near miss (+ video)

Ninety-nine-point-something per cent of the videos we show in our Near Miss of the Day series involve motor vehicles, but very occasionally one crops up featuring a pedestrian, and if you cycle in a city centre, you'll know the feeling ... you're riding along, and someone starts crossing the road; what happens next can be unpredictable.

This incident was filmed one evening last November by road.cc reader Andy on his commute home on James Watt Street in Glasgow, which runs from Argyle Street down to the Clyde. 

The pedestrian starts crossing without looking, then after spotting the cyclist, starts walking quickly across the road before thinking better of it and checking himself; for a bike rider in that situation, it's a 50:50 guess sometimes which way to go to avoid a collision which could leave one or both parties injured.

The situation here is made more hazardous of course by the width of the road being narrowed by the construction works on the left.

"Thankfully no actual collision but probably the closest near miss I've ever had, I reckon he was less than 5cm from catching my bars," Andy said.

Clearly an attentive student of road.cc comment threads, he added: "No doubt it'll generate some interesting discussion regarding who would have been at fault if I had hit him," he added. 

> 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