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Near Miss of the Day 804: Club run on receiving end of two shocking overtakes

Our regular series featuring close passes from around the country - today it's Staffordshire...

Keep today’s Near Miss handy for the next time a red-faced motorist scolds your group ride for cycling two abreast. In the above clip, a cycling club experienced two frighteningly similar overtakes on the same group ride – one while two abreast, the other while in the supposedly ‘safer’ single file formation.

The cyclists, members of the Wylde Green Wheelers cycling club, were first narrowly overtaken approaching a blind bend by a motorist – driving with a trailer attached to their car – who managed to pull in just before colliding with an oncoming bus.

The second near miss features a lorry driver deciding to overtake the riders as they enter a 30mph zone – and straight into the path of oncoming motorists too.

> 'Single file, the safest style' sign appears on Yorkshire road

The incidents took place during a WGW group ride around Great Haywood, Tixall & Brocton in Staffordshire on Friday 15 July.

“I’ve reported the first to the company,” says the road.cc reader who sent us the footage, though they told us that they are yet to receive a response.

“But as I’m not exactly sure where they took place I cannot refer them to the appropriate police force for action to be taken.”

> 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

Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.

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12 comments

Avatar
CXR94Di2 | 1 year ago
2 likes

One of my club mates was airlifted to Nottingham hospital with serious injuries after being hit by a vehicle on a club run. Major fractures, not sure of long term recovery

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lukei1 | 1 year ago
7 likes

TBH those should be straight to the police and if the riding club can't work out the location in order to report it, the they are useless

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HoarseMann replied to lukei1 | 1 year ago
3 likes

yep, this is the first location... https://goo.gl/maps/WfhtGmmqq5SG9fKs5

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Sevenfold replied to lukei1 | 1 year ago
1 like

As the person who recorded these, it was not on our normal roads but an 80 miler taking in a few steeper climbs than we get around our base north of Birmingham. I've never ridden these roads before so I'm sorry I didn't know where they were specifically. If I had they would have been reported.

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Fursty Ferret replied to Sevenfold | 1 year ago
1 like

If this happens in future then hit the lap button on your Garmin [other brands are available]. This'll leave a marker on the recording and you can pinpoint it on Strava or Garmin Connect.

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Rendel Harris replied to Sevenfold | 1 year ago
3 likes

Easily done on unfamiliar roads; bit late for this one but in future if anyone in your group is using Strava, just note the time into your ride of the incident then you can use the slider on the ride profile to find where on the map you were at that time, e.g. below from Friday, I can see that 38 minutes into the ride I was in the middle of Battersea Park (before any person of ill will, for I fear there are some, mocks the time/distance combination, I feel contrained to point out that time includes twenty minutes in the supermarket!).

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NOtotheEU replied to Rendel Harris | 1 year ago
1 like

Rendel Harris wrote:

(before any person of ill will, for I fear there are some, mocks the time/distance combination, I feel contrained to point out that time includes twenty minutes in the supermarket!).

Spoilsport! 😝

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stonojnr replied to Sevenfold | 1 year ago
2 likes

But that doesn't make any sense to me, even on unfamiliar roads you must have passed a road sign or landmark of some kind during the ride thats captured on the rest of the footage and could use Google earth maps to work it out ?

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Oldfatgit replied to stonojnr | 1 year ago
0 likes

Maybe the rider doesn't want to report it?
They don't *have* to ... although it would be nice if they did; but not everyone wants the hassles that can come with reporting it.

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AlsoSomniloquism replied to Oldfatgit | 1 year ago
0 likes

Although I believe sevenfold has reported before. Would be Staffordshire police covering there and they don't seem to have easy reporting methods like WMP do. 

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Sevenfold replied to AlsoSomniloquism | 1 year ago
4 likes

Yes that's correct. Staffordshire Police don't use the Nextbase portal unlike WM & Warwickshire Police. Some useful tips on here regarding Strava so will note for the future. Every day's a school day as they say.

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stonojnr replied to Oldfatgit | 1 year ago
1 like

Which is totally fair enough, I barely report close passes thesedays because its too much hassle for little impact. But Id not shy away from stating that was my choice with any video I shared.

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