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news
Near Miss of the Day 79: Kia skims Aussie rider at speed
The incident took place in Chevallum on the Sunshine Coast on December 27. Video uploader, Cameron, says his past experience with local police leads him to believe that they are highly unlikely to take action.
In the YouTube description, he writes: “After 4 years. This is still happening to riders in Qld. The police have no excuses for not issuing infringements in what could so easily end someone's life. No doubt this is not much different to the death of Pro rider Jason Lowndes in Victoria last week. Near miss after near miss. What the hell is wrong with people?”
Queensland was the first Australian state to implement a safe passing rule four years ago. Motorists must allow at least 1m when passing a cyclist in a 60km/h or less speed zone, or 1.5m where the speed limit is over 60km/h.
Cameron runs the Drive Safe, Pass Wide Facebook page to highlight close passes throughout Australia and has reported a number of incidents to Queensland Police.
He said that officers have provided him with, “a litany of excuses for poor driving around vulnerable road users – effectively excusing the behaviour of the drivers.”
He said: “Often I will need to follow up the first response with a second and I’ve found police will fall back on the [Queensland Police Service] operations manual under two sections: ‘Public Interest’ and ‘Things to consider when deciding to prosecute’. One of those ‘factors’ is ‘officer discretion’.”
He goes on to say that this means incidents such as this rarely come to anything.
“The personal prejudices I have felt coming from some police is quite alarming, and their opinions, attitudes and prejudices should have absolutely no impact on determining beyond reasonable doubt that a driver had passed outside the law and endangered my life.
“It seems that ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ has been put to bed in cases of close passing by police in Queensland. Instead, to dissuade a cyclist from pursuing these potentially life changing (or ending) passes there are yet more hoops to jump through and boxes that need to be ticked before anyone is issued an infringement.”
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.
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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16 comments
That was purposely close and would have been so regardless of the riders road position.
Had one very similar in Woodbridge, Suffolk UK last week.
Grey 4WD AU60 ZFF passed within inches at 50mph+ its just the driver trying to intimidate people on bikes of the road.
Some forces seem proactive West Midlands, Surrey Police for example others such as Suffolk Police dont give a toss.
Kia Picanto do-do (to the tune of Oye-me canto)
Not riding primary does vontribute to more close passes/dangerous overtakes.
It physically allows motorists to squeeze through without much thought, if rarely done then riding in the gutter is the accepted norm and Australian road laws stipulate you should ride as far left as possible so that's why not only the bogans can drive like this but literally everyone thinks it's acceptable and with a generation of okkers not having cycled with a large chunk of that due to a certain law we have this type of driving even more prevalent than here and an even less safe/more dangerous road culture.
Again, this is why helmets are such a massively bad thing, they contribute to virtually every negative aspect of safe cycling even if most of it indirectly, it's still a huge influencer even in incidents like this.
In 2012, I cycled around Aus and I found that the calibre of driver and attitudes towards cyclists were OK. However drink driving is a huge issues, some drivers even quote journey length by how many stubbies can be consumed. A 1 hour drive being 2 stubbies. 2 hours being 4! Crazy and deadly.
I blame the cyclist. I'm not sure why yet, but I'll find something to make me feel better in some weird way.
You're damn right! Bloody cyclist shouldn't be on the f***ing road in the first place. Roads are for cars... big, fast, angry cars and their big, fat, angry drivers!
Here's some of the reasons you were looking for... cyclists don't pay road tax, they slow traffic and create road rage, they look ugly (and very gay) in their lycra, they take over cafes (not that real men go to cafes, but you know what I mean), and via their "emissions" contribute significantly to the greenhouse effect (which is fake anyway).
I don't want to sound 'victim blaming' and it in no way excures a sh!t pass but the cyclist looks to be in or near the gutter which encorages such garbage. The crap driver might not even have saw them in their periphery
Much as this might normally be sound advice, the speed at which that car came round the corner left basically zero time for them to change course and in this instance I think may well have saved the cyclists life.
Lucky.
Couldn't agree more - if that cyclist had been taking primary s/he would have been wiped out from behind and killed. This is the sort of mis-informed nonsense comment from 'expert' commentators who regard themselves as uber-knowledgeable and only serve to supply justification to nut-cases killing or maiming cyclist . What next, if a cyclist was shot dead in a drive-by, s/he should have been wearing ceramic body armour? HLab your comment is the absolute definition of victim blaming.
That is an appalling pass.
I think riding in the secondary position is always preferable to the 'gutter'. I doubt that the car failed to see the cyclist. Once the car has passed, you can see it move slightly back towards the verge.
I don't want to sound like I am 'trashing your post' and it in no way excuses sarcasm, but the cyclist looks to be solo, spinning up a gradient on a quiet road and some idiot feels that it is justifiable to pass within inches. The crap driver just did not see him (full stop, leave the periphery vision shit out of it) and almost wiped him out. If I was out on my own climbing a similar gradient, I doubt whether I would be in primary.
Crap awful driving and innocent, reserved riding. It does not matter where on your side of the road you position your bike, this type of pass is dangerous and unacceptable.
our feature of close passes "from around the country".......last time I checked, Queensland was in Australia. Good old Cadel Evans, winning le Tour as a Brit......
Having watched some of the Aussie cop stuff on Youtube, it looks like a loony bin on the roads over there. No real punishments either and kids driving old skylines and stuff.
If the situation doesn't change then "a few years from now" all aussie traffic cops will be driving around in interceptors like this...
Mad-max-1.jpg
I would literally kill someone to own that car. And then once I owned the car I would kill some more people.
Shit! If the police don't prosecute for that, then they won't for anything. I've heard about the poor standard of driving in Australia. If that is common, I never want to cycle there. He could have so easily been killed.