Near Miss of the Day 446: Close pass of cyclist caught on bus’s own cameras

Toorie wrote:

I know what I think? As I am not a believer in this 1.5 metre rule, It should be pass at a safe distance.

You must have a lot of faith in the police and courts to think that would work better than having something measurable.

I have no faith in the police or courts, its too late then. You need to make life or death decisions on the road there and then.

In this given scenario, I would have been in the middle/primary of the advanced stop line. This would have been a more visible position for drivers behind, if they did close pass at least you have space to move to. Looking and listening to traffic behind, left and right. I may even have run the red light, all depending on the left/right traffic, and the speed and amount of rearwards traffic.

where would you suggest the cyclist go at 14 seconds then ? 

they cant shift left out of the way of the bus because that puts them on collision for the traffic lights or a garden wall, they cant brake because there are two cars following just as quickly through as the bus and who probably ploughed through on that if the bus can get through so can I mindset and wont be expecting the cyclist to even be there as theyve arrived with the bus hiding the cyclist.

I cant really see the cyclist had much choice other than to do what they did given they had about 1sec to react.

Pavement.

How can that not be a choice as an escape route?

Break the law to live. Simple. Always try to have an escape route.

Yeah because 1500 kg v 10 kg and 160 kph v 50 kph is equivalent.
I didn't realise road users had to get out of the way of bigger road users. Might is right then.
That would have been handy last night when I was stuck behind someone doing 26mph.

You can't possibly ride with a comment like that?

Do you move over for cyclists or do you feel entiled not to ?
And there are many car drivers driving with EMPTY SEATS and taking up a whole lane and psrtly responsible for gridlocks etc, whilst 2-wheels only take up a small portion of a lane and has negligible impact on the environment.
Get things into perspective before you demonise 2-wheel green travellers.

Double standards. What are saying? First "cyclists are all over the road" then this, if true, which is it?

You have to report. No point in uploading to social media. Just appalling comments and you are just identifying where you ride for drivers and bike thieves to find you.

dog_film wrote:

You have to report. No point in uploading to social media. Just appalling comments and you are just identifying where you ride for drivers and bike thieves to find you.

Considering the police rarely take action, companies like Stagecoach need to be forced into taking appropriate action and often the only way to do this is by putting it on social media. 

biker phil wrote:

I know an ex Stagecoach driver, he told me to always report it to them, apparently they take such reports very seriously. I reported a couple last year to them, an area manager called me, I had a good chat with him, he was very apologetic, at the end of the conversation he told me that my complaint wasn't the first they had received concerning this driver, and they had sacked him.

Sorry to disappoint you but they didn't, he's still driving for Stagecoach because they were lying to you.

Anyone who works as a manager in a Customer Service environment has this in their box of 'go-to' responses for complaints about the actions/attitudes of staff.

One computer engineer I worked with was 'sacked' 3 times because of customer complaints about him, just had to make sure we didn't send him back to the same sites.

The bus driver didn't jump the light.

The amber light is much brighter than the red and the green lights. If you look carefully, you can see that initially the red and amber lights are on, i.e. the lights are about to go green. The cyclist jumped the light, he was already about a bike length past the stop line when the green light came on (0.03 on the video). The bus was almost certainly behind his stop line at that time.

It looks to me that between the 28 and 29th seconds, where the slo mo is in effect, that the light goes from amber only to red only.  While the bus is still behing the ASL.

Also this looks like the behavior of a speeding "Amber Gambler".

The cyclist seemed to have gone through on amber alone.

It also seems like a busy junction, there are many other vehicles waiting at the other entrances to the junction.  Why were there no vehicles waiting at this entrance?  Maybe they had already gone through on the previous green.

Oh and no "Ambler Gamblers" coming from any other sides, if the light was just about to go green, that might be expected to be happening.  Not that I'm saying that any motorist would go through a red light, only cyclists do that...

Edit.  FIne points, well made.

I think it goes red/amber green. If you look at 4-7 seconds, traffic is moving from the opposite direction which is the standard for a 4 way (although you can get each point in turn on a few).

It's changing from red to green. You can see from the side view that the lights are red for the crossing traffic, and from the backwards view that traffic continues to come out from the same exit behind the bus.

Because of where the clip starts it's hard to tell whether the cyclist goes through the red light - it looks like they may have been waiting beyond the stop line and moved off on amber.

The light goes amber > green just as the bus enters the advanced stop box, so technically it didn't jump the lights, but there's no way the driver could have been confident that it would have been green, or the junction clear, by the time they got there, so they shouldn't have been approaching at that speed.

Indeed, the highway code does not say red and amber means approach at speed and trust green will come on before you reach the line

It looks like the cyclist is getting his left foot on the pedal when he first becomes visible, suggesting the lights have sequenced red to green, it also appears that at least two cars followed the bus through the lights. 

Or another camera has that but not the cyclist. Or it is held separately.