Near Miss of the Day 791: “Careful lad,” says van driver parked in bike lane… as another driver pushes in front

“Careful, lad”: Not a remark any cyclist wishes to hear following a close call with a motorist, but especially not coming from a driver brazenly parked in a cycle lane…

Pulled up on the bike lane, on double yellow lines, and blocking the entrance to a car park (just for bonus points), the van driver in this clip forces road.cc reader Pete out of his lane and almost into the path of a passing motorist.

“He then had the cheek to say ‘careful lad’ to me as I passed him, as if I was in the wrong,” Pete tell us.

The incident with the wise-cracking van driver wasn’t Pete’s only close call that day.

Earlier in the afternoon, a motorist decided to pass him right on a speed bump just as another driver, coming the opposite way, moved slightly into the other lane to avoid some parked cars, causing the overtaking driver to pull in sharply, narrowly avoiding Pete’s front wheel:

A pleasant stress-free day on the bike, then.

Pete declined to send either of the videos to the police, “as they rejected the first video I took to them around ten years ago which was a severe left hook causing me to go from 24 miles an hour to an almost skidding stop to avoid a collision.”

> 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