Near Miss of the Day 493: Aggressive close pass on cyclists ridingtwo abreast

QUOTE:
Today's video in our Near Miss of the Day series shows a cyclist riding side-by-side getting a close pass from a particularly aggressive driver who leans on the horn during the overtake. The incidents were filmed on Saturday by road.cc reader Rob, who said they struck him as particularly relevant given the recent focus by some parts of the media about cyclists riding two abreast.

"My first ride out with for a while with a friend and we were having a good ride on country lanes. The first incident was a Volvo and they couldn’t wait 10 seconds for an oncoming cyclist to pass before they tried to overtake.

"You can see they hesitated for a split second but then promptly drove through a tight gap giving little space to both us and the oncoming cyclist. It must have been worse for them. At least this pass wasn’t at speed and we weren’t riding two abreast.

"The second incident was very scary. I had literally just cycled up next to my friend to chat; throughout the ride we often rode two abreast aware of cars coming from behind or up front; we would move back into single file quickly once aware of a car.

"However, with this car there was no warning as they did not slow down at all and drove past at considerable speed (in excess of 40, probably 50 mph) and so close.

"You can see from the video that the car passed at speed within 50cm of me., probably nearer 30cm. To make matters worse they beeped the horn as if we were doing something wrong or to just intimidate us.

"I’ve had a quite a few bad experiences and this is probably one of the worst. This idiot needs to know they can’t drive like this and put people’s lives in danger so I have submitted to Surrey Police in the hope that they take action…….this is my first submission so fingers crossed.

"I’ve read the ’Near Miss of the Day’ reports on road cc for while and I thought this last miss was topical given the discussion around riding two abreast. I’m pretty sure that had we been riding single file the driver would have probably given us more room, although unlikely that they would have slowed down.

"The fact they beeped the horn makes it appear that they thought we were doing something wrong by riding two abreast which supports the fact that the Highway Code is not clear or that most drivers have their own version of what the Highway Code is/should be or they simply don’t care."

https://road.cc/content/news/near-mi...abreast-278441