Near Miss of the Day 829: Fast undertake on cyclist lands driver three points & fine

Today's Near Miss of the Day at least comes with the consolation that the offending driver was ultimately fined and saw their record endorsed with three penalty points for this dangerous undertaking manoeuvre.

It happened, road.cc reader Andrew tells us, on Baltic Road in Tonbridge at the point the road narrows to one-way over a steep rise.

"I checked behind and the BMW is some way back, as you can see from the initial footage from the seatpost camera," he recalled.

> (Not so) Near Miss of the Day 828: Driver hits cyclist at speed, leaving door mirror behind

"I moved into the centre of the lane, standing to get over as quickly as possible, and heard the engine gunning from behind. I thought 'to hell with the driver, I'm not moving over to the left; they can wait until it's safe to overtake'.

"Just as well as the driver sweeps past on the left well within the 1.5m shown by the tramlines. I reckon 99 per cent of cyclists would have been intimidated to moving over, with probable fatal consequences given the speed of the manoeuvre." 

The driver was reported to Kent Police and following a court hearing Andrew learnt the undertake earned them three points on their licence, a £120 fine, costs of £90 and a victim surcharge of £34.

> 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