> His reports have led to at least 2,721 penalty points, £168,568 in fines and, as he proudly displays in his X (Twitter) bio, “36 drivers DISQUALIFIED”.
I would like to borrow this guy for the road in front of my children's school.
> Now in his 50s, Erp was 19 and still living in his hometown of Harare, Zimbabwe, when he got the call from a local shopkeeper telling him that a drunk driver had collided with his father, who was riding a motorbike. By the time he arrived on the scene, it was too late. He found his father’s body under a blanket. “I’m long past that”, he says in his thick Zimbabwean accent, swilling his tea. “But my feeling is that if I can save someone else that experience, then that’d be quite a good thing.”
I’ve fantasized about carrying a bullhorn on my bike and just calling people out: “hey you in the Tesla, put your phone down!” Sadly the enforcement of the hands free law where I live is nonexistent. What’s surprising to me about this article is that the police will actually act on this guy’s tips and evidence.
my repeated fantasies are a blind person with a reinforced version of their stick, using that stick to great effect to damage cars that are parked on the sidewalk. like, when they bump into a car they take the stick an beat the car for all that its worth creating as much damage as possible.
the other fantasy is carrying a bazooka and shooting anyone speeding. optionally the weapon is futuristic and able to just vaporize the car while leaving passengers unharmed. they just suddenly find themselves sitting on the street looking dumbfounded.
Traffic enforcement is minimal. As a cyclist, I can choose any busy city road and go past lots of drivers using their phones whilst stuck in traffic.
Close passes are not something the police look for (excepting a couple of specific operations where they had a cycling officer) so bikecams are the only way to get the police to take any action and that is usually just to send a warning letter.
The enforcement is patchy. There are loads of cameras and they pick up some things like speeding or driving in bus lanes but not others live those you mention. I drive and cycle and driving in central London is an odd experience these days that seems almost stationary - wait at lights for a minute, roll a few yards at 15 mph, wait again.
Most actual cycle deaths seem to be people crushed by lorries when turning at junctions which seems more an engineering issue - the drivers can't see etc. than bad driving.
The onus is on a driver making a manoeuvre to ensure that it is safe to do so, and turning left shouldn't just be performed blindly if the driver has restricted view around their vehicle. However, there's a lot of poorly designed junctions as well.
I believe that one way to improve the problem of left-turns is to have traffic lights that enable cyclists to go first, or allowing cyclists to treat red lights as "give way" signs or turn-left-on-red.
There's also the question of whether we should allow vehicles to use public roads if they have known "blind spots" that drivers are not able to resolve by moving their heads.
Personally, I'd like to see a far more serious attitude to road/traffic safety. When there's a fatal collision, the junction/road should be closed to motor traffic until the junction can be made safe (e.g. adding a separate cycle lane or amending the traffic lights). However, motornormativity suggests that it'll never happen.
I'm not sure with the trucks. My guess is requiring cameras that provide a view of the problem areas might be the thing, possibly with some AI that detects cyclists and the like. I think a lot have warning signs on now for cyclists. Personally I never stop anywhere near them and treat the red lights as kind of give ways.
I'm not sure the highway code rules are that appropriate for places like central London. I tend to treat the whole place like a pedestrianised area - not worrying too much about road signs but giving way to pedestrians.
Traffic fines go to the central government, not local areas or police forces. On the one hand it takes away incentives to game the system (e.g designing suddenly speed limit reductions on otherwise fast roads), but it also means that enforcement is lacking as it becomes a cost for local governments and police forces
It does vary wildly across the UK. I've had success with reporting in Avon&Somerset, but other areas have the police creating excuses for the drivers and finding any reason to blame the cyclist.
I walk around North London a lot and after a recent day of various hijinx involving careless drivers, I looked into bodycams with an eye to just having one run as I walk around to capture the various dangerous transgressions and then report onwards to the relevant authorities.
But, the more I looked into it, the more self-conscious I got that a) I would be a sad curmudgeon to do such a thing and, b) I'd be sleep-walking into some horrid authority-complicit sousveillance that raises uncomfortable questions.
Still, I'd really like to report those [expletive deleted]s who skip over pedestrian crossings at speed, on their phone. Gits.
Oh, this is the "Gandalf Corner" guy[1], who has a lot of videos of himself blocking people trying to drive on the wrong side of the road to skip the queue at an intersection. What always gets me is how smug and entitled the people are, even when they realize he's not going to back down. That and the silly "I'm going to get away with this because I always have" grins his subjects alway seem to have. Good job to this guy.
I'm a driver, not a cyclist, and I'm behind those interventions. People are on the wrong side of the road at a blind corner. If I were turning out, I could end up with someone facing me head on.
On the phone stuff, I support him too, but that law needs a serious tweak to cover emergencies that require less than a 999 call. Stopped at lights, I saw a hit and run, instinctively reached for my phone for a picture, but stopped myself. That's not a net good for society IMO, but it's the law.
Dashcams are the best bet for recording evidence like that. We don't want to create loopholes for drivers to pay even less attention to driving safely.
Is there a cheap and convenient way to have a front/back camera on your bike, yet? Or a bike helmet with inconspicous front+rear camera? I'm aware of the Garmin Varia line, but it's quite expensive and I don't care about the radar.
You can just get some ball mounts and an action camera or two. The new cameras have such good stabilization that a handlebar mount is very acceptable now.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPMBL924 + a ball for the handlebar and a short extension. You can use the smaller ball size, it is still plenty sturdy.
Also expensive, but the best options for cyclists are the Cycliq front and rear cameras/lights. They're best fitted to the bike and provide excellent footage along with being easy to manage (they overwrite old recordings automatically unless they're marked as being an incident where the camera goes onto its side).
Helmet cameras may compromise the "protection" provided by a cycle helmet though cycle helmets are next to useless in a multi vehicle collision anyway.
The only time I ever hear something about vegans or crossfitters are from people complaining about them. Rarely to never do I hear something from them.
Fast personal transportation is so high utility that people will dismiss many externalities. If you offered teleportation anywhere in the world except it would pick a random African and kill him at a 1E-6 to 1E-4 chance (depending on your skill at Tetris while being teleported), I suspect many in the West would do it without a question.
If you spent an hour watching traffic in Lagos, Nigeria, you'd see that West Africans themselves value the utility of personal transportation above the safety of their neighbors on the road.
And what indication do you have the opposite wouldn’t happen if the tech were available for them to use with the same caveats except the victim having to be from from somewhere outside of Africa?
His father was killed (whilst riding a motorbike) by a drunk driver, so I think he has every right to want traffic laws to be upheld. The only people who don't like what he's doing are habitual law-breakers who don't like the idea that laws apply to them.
That caught my eye too. Is it illegal in the UK to look at your phone while stopped at a light? If so that's a very silly law, it hurts nobody to look down while the car isn't in motion.
What percentage of drivers actually put their phone down when they start moving, would you say? Anybody will slowly normalize the behavior. It's just stopped traffic. It's a traffic jam, we're only moving 5mph. I'll put the phone down if we actually get going, etc.
It's illegal in most US states as well, though it appears to be rarely enforced. The worst outcome of being distracted while stopped is simply holding up traffic, so perhaps police feel it's petty to enforce it.
No, the worst outcome is much worse than that. You need to keep track of what is going on around, or you won't be able to account for you surroundings when you start moving again. I see these failures all the time: a driver of a stopped car is distracted, then realizes that the lights have turned green (or, even more commonly in these types of situations, a space has opened for them to merge into or pass through) and they "have" to get moving, now. Now they are in a hurry, and obviously can't afford to take a moment to take a careful stock of everything going on around them, so inevitably, they end up missing something. Usually someone else (such as myself, pushing a stroller) will be able to react in time and an accident is avoided, but it should not go like that. If you can't or aren't willing to attend to traffic, get out of it.
There have been people injured and killed by drivers who believe that kind of claptrap. The problem is that drivers take time to adjust from staring at a screen to looking ahead at the road. I've seen some estimates that it takes between twenty and forty seconds for a drivers attention to context switch like that. What happens is that a driver barely looks up when the vehicle in front might start to move and they just carelessly think that they should move forwards as well, even though they haven't spotted a filtering cyclist or road-crossing pedestrian.
The law was brought in specifically to try to save lives - hardly a "silly" reason.
That's the thing - even if it is illegal, it isn't hurting anyone, and no doubt cops do it as well. He may as well go around filming people jaywalking on empty streets for all the good it's doing.
The problem is that distracted drivers do kill, main and injure other people.
"Jaywalking" was an invention by motor car manufacturers to try to victim blame pedestrians for careless driving incidents - luckily we don't have that in Britain.
Yes, 2 other people pointed that out almost a full day ago. Instead, you can replace jaywalking with some other mundane thing that technically might be illegal but which most people do and harms no one.
Society only moves forward through the actions of a few whose behaviour is so out of the norm that we would consider it crazy. However, one must commend whatever organizational structure allows for this man’s reports to actually yield consequences. In the Bay Area, these will go nowhere.
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Operation SNAP is a huge success; but it has issues - one being that it is implemented per police force which means the quality of input and response is hugely varied.
I've reported a few which have gone nowhere, because my local force is useless.
This might explain a mystery I was pondering - I cycled up to St Pancras station and some guy I'd never seen before said "no one likes you" which puzzled me but looking at the article my appearance is pretty much like Cycling Mikey.
While he probably does a good job, it seems a bit over the top. I don't see that much bad driving in central London. Quite a lot of iffy cycling though especially from the deliveroo guys.
I'm a cyclist, pedestrian and car driver - I hate the echo chamber approach.
I'm sure there is a lot positive to be said for his work; unfortunately he - like many (most?) on each side in the cyclists vs cars vs pedestrians debate - is as much an idealogue as anybody, often unwilling to acknowledge the excesses and poor behaviour of cyclists - leaving him untrustworthy as a good faith participant, while allowing his video evidence as useful in more balanced hands.
And as always, when this debate comes up, the reply is very simple: pedestrians and bicyclists don't endanger other people's lives, car drivers do. That is really where the discussion should start and finish.
Where I struggle with Mikey is that he really pushes the envelope of what a civilian is supposed to do.
- Filming his commutes - fine
- Reporting when people put him in harm's way - more than fine
- Reporting people he sees who don't endanger him personally but are breaking the rules and could create dangerous situations - probably fine, though getting a little iffy for me
- Going out of his way to look into people's cars and look for phone use - pretty iffy
- Deliberately creating confrontation and direct danger, out of other drivers illegal driving - too far for sure (look up "Gandalf corner")
It is sucky that the police don't do more of this enforcement. But as another London cyclist, he crosses the line that makes me feel less safe as a cyclist, due to the elevated level of hate cyclists receive.
There's a much less effective guy in Germany who does a similar thing, but for parking violations. He'll ride around in his small town until he finds someone whose car is 20 cm from the curb instead of the maximum allowable 15 cm, or a car is 199 cm from a hydrant instead of the required 200 cm, or some similar insignificant situation.
He documents these "transgressions", and submit it to the police. He calculates that he's brought the city hundreds of thousands of Euros in revenue.
Except the police ignore all of his reports because they're mostly nit-picky bullshit.
> Not many people die by cannibalism every year, do they? But are we suggesting that because not many people die by cannibalism, we don’t actually introduce legislation to outlaw it?
Uhm no because there are no downsides to a law against cannibalism. There are significant downsides to a law requiring number plates on bicycles. What an idiot.
Since this site has a very international audience, it's quite important to make clear: there's not some road safety inspired reason for this. Mickey is an adrenaline junky who loves to start fights in public and he's found a way to do that in a mostly legal way. Sometimes, a little less legal, like when he lept onto the bonnet of a car in order to feign he'd been run over, or when he threw his bicycle into the path of an oncoming car endangering pretty much everyone in the situation (interestingly, a situation in which the author of this article seems to imply the car was to blame, not Mikey for deliberately throwing his bike into the path of the car, calculatingly not actually throwing himself into the path).
The guy has got sucked into a sort of spiral where he's going out to create these confrontations (partly to monetize on youtube), and he will, eventually cause some serious harm to himself or someone else. This article kind of misses that this isn't a story about road safety, it's more a story about how people can self-radicalise and how social media has created a profit incentive for them to do so.
It's difficult to watch a motorist threaten to take his own life if this guy reports him and then remember that actually, that's happening for ad revenue.
So, don't fuck around with your phone while driving. Stick to the traffic rules. Avoiding him seems really, really easy.
Anyone who chooses to grab their phone while driving a car deserves all the negativity they get. Unlearn that habit. Seek help if you're addicted to that device. Or just take the Tube.
Yeah this is the animosity I'm talking about. I'd just point out that this also translates to drivers showing that animosity to cyclists on the streets in London.
There's a huge difference between "animosity" because someone is endangering your life and "animosity" because you're stuck in traffic and don't like seeing a cyclist making progress. Most of the "animosity" from drivers is due to them not thinking clearly about the situation and also being aggressive bullies.
If you're queuing in traffic or stopped at some lights, then you're still in control of a big metal machine on the road and have a responsibility to have your attention on the road. If you're distracted then you might not notice a situation where you need to move the car aside in order to prevent an accident from escalating.
In my mind vigilante implies actually doing something to the criminal above and beyond documenting what they’re doing.
“a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate)”
That’s from Miriam Webster. I’d say he isn’t punishing crime, I could see an argument that he’s suppressing it, but it doesn’t really fit my normal view of the word.
Running into traffic to pick a fight with them? Throwing your bike in front of their car to cause a collision? Jumping onto their bonnet to try and pretend you're being run over?
The guy is quite literally taking the law into his own hands and it's very clear that running around trying to cause car accidents is making people less safe, not more. In many cases the "accident" he claims to want to prevent is caused by his actions.
That not really how it works though. Laws and morals do not perfectly align even in mostly civilised countries like the UK.
More importantly, laws are written under the tacit assumption that they won't be perfectly enforced. Have you ever driven 31 mph in a 30 mph zone? Illegal! You're in the wrong!
I have never watched his videos so I don't know what proportion of his videos are of people stopped at lights briefly looking at their phone... but I don't think many people (even cyclists) would seriously object to that.
I both cycle and drive a lot. There are a lot of bad drivers that I wish would get snitched. But I also occasionally look at my phone while waiting at a red light.
Mikey might have a profit incentive at play, but let's be abundantly clear - the drivers he is catching are frequently flagrantly breaking the law and endangering both themselves and the people around them. I have a very hard time feeling sympathy for those who are unable or unwilling to operate a car safely on public roads.
Until they drive off while still looking at it, like the woman who drove through a pedestrian crossing a couple of weeks ago and almost hit me while I was walking across.
I think a little reasoning at global scale easily arrives at a defence of the current traffic law depending on risk tolerance, but perhaps an analogy will help: most societies believe (or at least enforce in a manner that reflects belief) that walking around with a handgun out in your hand should be illegal. In truth no harm is done until one pulls the trigger, and there is certainly benefit: it is much faster to stop a criminal when you're ready at hand.
The reasons we don't do that are manifold, but at least a few are analogous:
* legibility: we don't need just lack of harm, we require common knowledge that harm is unlikely in order for society to work with frictionlessness we desire
* distinguishability: at some percentage of accidental behaviour, we must constrain all people because we don't have a mechanism to determine who will likely cause it and who won't
* reversibility: for sufficient harm, it is better to restrict the error condition than it is to punish
Because we know we cannot bring the dead back to life, and no amount of prison will bring solace to their loved ones, we have decided that doing things that are high-risk to others is not permissible. Given this framework for the moral concern, it's just an optimization problem. The question then becomes what fraction of pedestrians killed in crosswalks is acceptable, or even what fraction of pedestrians following the law killed in crosswalks is acceptable. Some societies believe this should be zero (hence the amusingly named Vision Zero and so on as practised in Northern Europe). Others believe this should be fairly high (like the US) because the utility loss from constraint is too high.
Now the handgun case has a very high number for potential risk, so it's obvious why most societies have that law. The crossing point of risk for almost everyone is below it, consequently most agree. The question then becomes what your crossing point for risk is and whether the number of accidental deaths is above your threshold or below your threshold. But in either case, I don't think the argument "until they hurt someone, no harm is done, and therefore it should be permissible" holds, for if it did, surely we would allow for people walking around with handguns, perhaps even pointed directly in front of them as they walk, so long as they do not pull the trigger. And that seems to be an absurdity.
The specificity of handgun versus firearms in general belies the weakness of the argument. Would it matter in the thought experiment if it were a long gun?
The status of open carry legality in a US state is not correlated with firearms violence rates. Firearm prevalence in general is.
I support Vision Zero. It has a sound logical and statistical basis.
Vision Zero is orthogonal to a law against using a mobile telephone while operating a vehicle that is stopped.
I almost can't beleive adults are having this conversation.
You have never been sitting at a light, and see everone around you with their heads down, while the light has been green for 4 seconds?
Inverse, Have you ever been rear ended because a person staring down at their phone at a red light just decides to roll forward because someones brake lights in the pack deluminate for a moment?
I ask, because point 1 happens to me daily, and point 2 has put my car in the shop for weeks twice in the last 5 years.
A totally separate point to make; what could you possibly be doing on the phone? Like how addicted to social media or work must one be that they wait for the briefest of moments to distract themselves? I ask that not to judge or poke fun, but to say that you MUST be doing something that you find so important, and thus taking your attention, that it is now your priority. Or else, you would choose to wait.
I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know what people are talking about here.
I can stay parked at a green light the entire cycle, and it still will be 100% the fault of the person who rear ends me.
As for what I'm doing, it's probably something like scrolling the map to see what road I'll be turning on in 5 minutes, so that I don't have to look at it (regardless of whether I'd be touching it) later. Or a dozen other similar things, none of which have anything to do with social media.
And I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know this.
Perhaps not while you’re not moving, but when you suddenly realise that the traffic light has changed to green and move off in a rush while distracted without having been monitoring the traffic, don’t you think that it’s more likely you’ll be hit by the truck that rolled through the lights as it turned red?
Other drivers are doing dangerous actions. For example, the embedded video in the article showed a driver crash into his bicycle as he crossed the street. That driver then departed the scene. Hit and run is culturally and legally offensive in the UK and the rest of the OECD.
I'm comparing someone getting off on reporting people to the authorities to people who got off on reporting people to the authorities. It's the same self-righteous attitude either way.
The car was stationary until just before he stepped out and the driver already knew to expect that he would do so. It does seem that Mikey had time to avoid the crash though.
In future, if you think he's on the right side, link to the video of him doing it, not an 8 minute video talking around the fact he did it. There was no reason for the bicycle to enter the carriage way other than to come directly into the path of the vehicle. People think there's some sort of "Oh well if what you're doing isn't following the highway code then I can do ANYTHING and you're at fault" attitude, and it just isn't true. The driver shouldn't have gone that direction and Mikey shouldn't have caused the crash.
People shouldn't break the law while driving. What Cycling Mikey is doing is ill-advised and dangerous.
Throwing an ebike is pretty impressive cause they're big and bulky. A regular road bike isn't too bad... hard to get a lot of distance, but you can toss them a bit. Rolling them is easier, if you push hard enough and they're reasonably balanced you'll get some good distance before they fall over.
At most, this was rolling it into traffic, but my view is he had a hand on the handlebar until right around the collision, so he was just walking with his bike.
But WTF is that traffic configuration? Why are people trying to drive through that lane in the wrong direction? Seems like a good way to get a head-on with a car in addition to pedestrians that weren't expecting a wrong way driver.
Vehicle operators usually have a duty not to proceed unless safe, even when they have right of way, I'm not sure how much that duty applies to pedestrians or if natural consequences is enough.
That's exactly what Mr. Loophole would say. Mickey risking his life for ad revenue. Sure. Mickey throwing his bike in front of a speeding vehicle, when he clearly dismounted before getting struck. Sorry mate, I live, drive and cycle in a country with the highest road fatalities in the EU. I think its unfair to take it out on Mickey.
I wonder how long it is until some driver just has an 'accident' and hits this guy. For the most part he's not making streets safer, but just costing people money.
Reminds me of the mpls bike wraith[0] guy, someone just going around looking for trouble.
> For the most part he's not making streets safer, but just costing people money.
It's not just a fine when caught using your phone while driving, it's also 6 penalty points (of a maximum 12). Being caught a second time (or if you are within 2 years of earning your license) results in a ban from driving for 6 months.
People who are caught once will likely think twice about using their phone again, not wanting to risk the ban.
That doesn't make anything better. No one deserves points for checking a phone briefly while a vehicle is stopped at a red light. In the long run, problems like Mikey sort themselves out - Darwin at work.
If no one deserves points for checking a phone briefly while a vehicle is stopped at a red light, then either the police can decide not to act on video footage showing someone doing this, or the law should be changed.
Sure, the law should be changed, and I'm sure the police frequently do decide to ignore it. But then you have this dipshit vigilante endangering himself, causing tension and handing them a free win (i.e. free money), so of course they take it.
Two things can be true: checking a phone while stopped hurts nobody and should not be illegal. Driving the wrong way in an intersection and nearly hitting a cyclist is dangerous and this activity should be curbed.
If he was only harassing people who were actually a danger, there wouldn't be much to complain about. But he isn't, he'll harass whoever he can for clicks and ego.
I lean toward your understanding of the topic but experience discomfort toward your framing, which implies a desire or at least apathy to the harm of this Youtuber.
This content creator is undoubtedly seeking conflicts with people and shrouding it in concerns for traffic safety.
Furthermore, most driving fatalities are spatially correlated— road design influences driver behavior more than other factors.
However, there is merit to noxious individuals raising an issue to the level of public consciousness.
It is also possible that the trajectory of traffic calming measures is already good in the UK and would not benefit from additional public exposure.
> His reports have led to at least 2,721 penalty points, £168,568 in fines and, as he proudly displays in his X (Twitter) bio, “36 drivers DISQUALIFIED”.
I would like to borrow this guy for the road in front of my children's school.
Vital bit of background context from the article:
> Now in his 50s, Erp was 19 and still living in his hometown of Harare, Zimbabwe, when he got the call from a local shopkeeper telling him that a drunk driver had collided with his father, who was riding a motorbike. By the time he arrived on the scene, it was too late. He found his father’s body under a blanket. “I’m long past that”, he says in his thick Zimbabwean accent, swilling his tea. “But my feeling is that if I can save someone else that experience, then that’d be quite a good thing.”
Mikey discussed 4 years ago here:
‘I felt powerless – so I started filming’: CyclingMikey on his one-man battle with dangerous drivers (126 points, 221 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29810943
I’ve fantasized about carrying a bullhorn on my bike and just calling people out: “hey you in the Tesla, put your phone down!” Sadly the enforcement of the hands free law where I live is nonexistent. What’s surprising to me about this article is that the police will actually act on this guy’s tips and evidence.
my repeated fantasies are a blind person with a reinforced version of their stick, using that stick to great effect to damage cars that are parked on the sidewalk. like, when they bump into a car they take the stick an beat the car for all that its worth creating as much damage as possible.
the other fantasy is carrying a bazooka and shooting anyone speeding. optionally the weapon is futuristic and able to just vaporize the car while leaving passengers unharmed. they just suddenly find themselves sitting on the street looking dumbfounded.
In the UK most traffic enforcement is based on cameras. I guess using film taken by the public rather than a fixed camera is a small change.
Traffic enforcement is minimal. As a cyclist, I can choose any busy city road and go past lots of drivers using their phones whilst stuck in traffic.
Close passes are not something the police look for (excepting a couple of specific operations where they had a cycling officer) so bikecams are the only way to get the police to take any action and that is usually just to send a warning letter.
The enforcement is patchy. There are loads of cameras and they pick up some things like speeding or driving in bus lanes but not others live those you mention. I drive and cycle and driving in central London is an odd experience these days that seems almost stationary - wait at lights for a minute, roll a few yards at 15 mph, wait again.
Most actual cycle deaths seem to be people crushed by lorries when turning at junctions which seems more an engineering issue - the drivers can't see etc. than bad driving.
I think it's both.
The onus is on a driver making a manoeuvre to ensure that it is safe to do so, and turning left shouldn't just be performed blindly if the driver has restricted view around their vehicle. However, there's a lot of poorly designed junctions as well.
I believe that one way to improve the problem of left-turns is to have traffic lights that enable cyclists to go first, or allowing cyclists to treat red lights as "give way" signs or turn-left-on-red.
There's also the question of whether we should allow vehicles to use public roads if they have known "blind spots" that drivers are not able to resolve by moving their heads.
Personally, I'd like to see a far more serious attitude to road/traffic safety. When there's a fatal collision, the junction/road should be closed to motor traffic until the junction can be made safe (e.g. adding a separate cycle lane or amending the traffic lights). However, motornormativity suggests that it'll never happen.
I'm not sure with the trucks. My guess is requiring cameras that provide a view of the problem areas might be the thing, possibly with some AI that detects cyclists and the like. I think a lot have warning signs on now for cyclists. Personally I never stop anywhere near them and treat the red lights as kind of give ways.
I'm not sure the highway code rules are that appropriate for places like central London. I tend to treat the whole place like a pedestrianised area - not worrying too much about road signs but giving way to pedestrians.
And this is something that would definitely net a good amount of money to municipal coffers in fines while educating drivers.
Traffic fines go to the central government, not local areas or police forces. On the one hand it takes away incentives to game the system (e.g designing suddenly speed limit reductions on otherwise fast roads), but it also means that enforcement is lacking as it becomes a cost for local governments and police forces
It does vary wildly across the UK. I've had success with reporting in Avon&Somerset, but other areas have the police creating excuses for the drivers and finding any reason to blame the cyclist.
Does London not have some TerryB-style fixed gear riders that are more controversial than this guy? :)
Line of Sight definitely had a London section, though it is quite old now https://youtu.be/0npCFw9TEnA?t=1720
Some of those TerryB videos are crazy. I still remember one where they got on the highway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbCzWRnKCaI
What an interesting long-form portrait.
Looking at your phone while driving is extremely dangerous, please don’t do it.
I walk around North London a lot and after a recent day of various hijinx involving careless drivers, I looked into bodycams with an eye to just having one run as I walk around to capture the various dangerous transgressions and then report onwards to the relevant authorities.
But, the more I looked into it, the more self-conscious I got that a) I would be a sad curmudgeon to do such a thing and, b) I'd be sleep-walking into some horrid authority-complicit sousveillance that raises uncomfortable questions.
Still, I'd really like to report those [expletive deleted]s who skip over pedestrian crossings at speed, on their phone. Gits.
Oh, this is the "Gandalf Corner" guy[1], who has a lot of videos of himself blocking people trying to drive on the wrong side of the road to skip the queue at an intersection. What always gets me is how smug and entitled the people are, even when they realize he's not going to back down. That and the silly "I'm going to get away with this because I always have" grins his subjects alway seem to have. Good job to this guy.
1: https://www.youtube.com/@CyclingMikey/videos
I'm a driver, not a cyclist, and I'm behind those interventions. People are on the wrong side of the road at a blind corner. If I were turning out, I could end up with someone facing me head on.
On the phone stuff, I support him too, but that law needs a serious tweak to cover emergencies that require less than a 999 call. Stopped at lights, I saw a hit and run, instinctively reached for my phone for a picture, but stopped myself. That's not a net good for society IMO, but it's the law.
Dashcams are the best bet for recording evidence like that. We don't want to create loopholes for drivers to pay even less attention to driving safely.
111?
Is there a cheap and convenient way to have a front/back camera on your bike, yet? Or a bike helmet with inconspicous front+rear camera? I'm aware of the Garmin Varia line, but it's quite expensive and I don't care about the radar.
You can just get some ball mounts and an action camera or two. The new cameras have such good stabilization that a handlebar mount is very acceptable now.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPMBL924 + a ball for the handlebar and a short extension. You can use the smaller ball size, it is still plenty sturdy.
Also expensive, but the best options for cyclists are the Cycliq front and rear cameras/lights. They're best fitted to the bike and provide excellent footage along with being easy to manage (they overwrite old recordings automatically unless they're marked as being an incident where the camera goes onto its side).
Helmet cameras may compromise the "protection" provided by a cycle helmet though cycle helmets are next to useless in a multi vehicle collision anyway.
I love how the UK has a top villans list.
It's absurd how improving traffic safety can be seen as villainous. Are humans really that selfish? Apparently.
There is nobody as entitled as a driver.
I'd like to bring your attention to vegans, cyclists, and crossfitters
Weird. None of those people have ever almost killed me trying to save 3 minutes.
They only wish they were saving 3 minutes. Drivers pull the most outlandish, dangerous crap to end up 2-3 car lengths ahead of where they were.
The only time I ever hear something about vegans or crossfitters are from people complaining about them. Rarely to never do I hear something from them.
Fast personal transportation is so high utility that people will dismiss many externalities. If you offered teleportation anywhere in the world except it would pick a random African and kill him at a 1E-6 to 1E-4 chance (depending on your skill at Tetris while being teleported), I suspect many in the West would do it without a question.
If you spent an hour watching traffic in Lagos, Nigeria, you'd see that West Africans themselves value the utility of personal transportation above the safety of their neighbors on the road.
We already do similar stuff for oil, uranium, and cobalt.
And what indication do you have the opposite wouldn’t happen if the tech were available for them to use with the same caveats except the victim having to be from from somewhere outside of Africa?
He's specifically harassing people who are literally stopped:
“Then he sees it: a driver idling in the late afternoon gridlock while scrolling his phone. Perfect.”
What do you suggest, he tries to get alongside moving vehicles with drivers that aren't paying attention?
Using your phone at all while driving in the UK is illegal, stopped or otherwise.
I suggest he bugger off with his self-rightousness.
His father was killed (whilst riding a motorbike) by a drunk driver, so I think he has every right to want traffic laws to be upheld. The only people who don't like what he's doing are habitual law-breakers who don't like the idea that laws apply to them.
Stopping someone committing a crime is not harassment.
That caught my eye too. Is it illegal in the UK to look at your phone while stopped at a light? If so that's a very silly law, it hurts nobody to look down while the car isn't in motion.
What percentage of drivers actually put their phone down when they start moving, would you say? Anybody will slowly normalize the behavior. It's just stopped traffic. It's a traffic jam, we're only moving 5mph. I'll put the phone down if we actually get going, etc.
It's illegal in most US states as well, though it appears to be rarely enforced. The worst outcome of being distracted while stopped is simply holding up traffic, so perhaps police feel it's petty to enforce it.
No, the worst outcome is much worse than that. You need to keep track of what is going on around, or you won't be able to account for you surroundings when you start moving again. I see these failures all the time: a driver of a stopped car is distracted, then realizes that the lights have turned green (or, even more commonly in these types of situations, a space has opened for them to merge into or pass through) and they "have" to get moving, now. Now they are in a hurry, and obviously can't afford to take a moment to take a careful stock of everything going on around them, so inevitably, they end up missing something. Usually someone else (such as myself, pushing a stroller) will be able to react in time and an accident is avoided, but it should not go like that. If you can't or aren't willing to attend to traffic, get out of it.
They would be right to feel that way.
There have been people injured and killed by drivers who believe that kind of claptrap. The problem is that drivers take time to adjust from staring at a screen to looking ahead at the road. I've seen some estimates that it takes between twenty and forty seconds for a drivers attention to context switch like that. What happens is that a driver barely looks up when the vehicle in front might start to move and they just carelessly think that they should move forwards as well, even though they haven't spotted a filtering cyclist or road-crossing pedestrian.
The law was brought in specifically to try to save lives - hardly a "silly" reason.
That's the thing - even if it is illegal, it isn't hurting anyone, and no doubt cops do it as well. He may as well go around filming people jaywalking on empty streets for all the good it's doing.
Jaywalking is legal in the uk
So replace it with some other mundane thing that technically might be illegal but which most people do and harms no one.
Fortunately for the people in London and the UK, jaywalking is not illegal.
So replace it with some other mundane thing that technically might be illegal but which most people do and harms no one.
> and no doubt cops do it as well
How is this a defense?
It illustrates it's a harmless mundane offense that while technically illegal harms no one.
The problem is that distracted drivers do kill, main and injure other people.
"Jaywalking" was an invention by motor car manufacturers to try to victim blame pedestrians for careless driving incidents - luckily we don't have that in Britain.
Yes, 2 other people pointed that out almost a full day ago. Instead, you can replace jaywalking with some other mundane thing that technically might be illegal but which most people do and harms no one.
The Daily Mail, not the UK. It trades in hate.
I mean,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Ten_Most_Wanted_Fugitives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Most_Wanted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Caucus
Need I go on?
Society only moves forward through the actions of a few whose behaviour is so out of the norm that we would consider it crazy. However, one must commend whatever organizational structure allows for this man’s reports to actually yield consequences. In the Bay Area, these will go nowhere.
Like the George Bernard Shaw quote:
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
One of my favorites, also this:
I look crazy but I'm not. And the funny thing is that other people don't look crazy but they are.
— eden ahbez
Operation SNAP is a huge success; but it has issues - one being that it is implemented per police force which means the quality of input and response is hugely varied.
I've reported a few which have gone nowhere, because my local force is useless.
This might explain a mystery I was pondering - I cycled up to St Pancras station and some guy I'd never seen before said "no one likes you" which puzzled me but looking at the article my appearance is pretty much like Cycling Mikey.
While he probably does a good job, it seems a bit over the top. I don't see that much bad driving in central London. Quite a lot of iffy cycling though especially from the deliveroo guys.
I'm a cyclist, pedestrian and car driver - I hate the echo chamber approach.
I'm sure there is a lot positive to be said for his work; unfortunately he - like many (most?) on each side in the cyclists vs cars vs pedestrians debate - is as much an idealogue as anybody, often unwilling to acknowledge the excesses and poor behaviour of cyclists - leaving him untrustworthy as a good faith participant, while allowing his video evidence as useful in more balanced hands.
And as always, when this debate comes up, the reply is very simple: pedestrians and bicyclists don't endanger other people's lives, car drivers do. That is really where the discussion should start and finish.
Eh? See my comment "unwilling to acknowledge the excesses and poor behaviour of cyclists".
Cyclists certainly endanger people, you could have done a 5 second fact check before posting.
Eg.
Cyclists injured record number of pedestrians last year, data reveals
Collisions on pavements and at zebra crossings surged nearly 60 percent in five years
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/cyclists-injured-pedestrians-r...
Ah London drivers. I got hit in docklands and went flying off my bike around the time Mikey got started. Good job!
Hit in the docklands! sounds painful.
Where I struggle with Mikey is that he really pushes the envelope of what a civilian is supposed to do.
- Filming his commutes - fine
- Reporting when people put him in harm's way - more than fine
- Reporting people he sees who don't endanger him personally but are breaking the rules and could create dangerous situations - probably fine, though getting a little iffy for me
- Going out of his way to look into people's cars and look for phone use - pretty iffy
- Deliberately creating confrontation and direct danger, out of other drivers illegal driving - too far for sure (look up "Gandalf corner")
It is sucky that the police don't do more of this enforcement. But as another London cyclist, he crosses the line that makes me feel less safe as a cyclist, due to the elevated level of hate cyclists receive.
There's a much less effective guy in Germany who does a similar thing, but for parking violations. He'll ride around in his small town until he finds someone whose car is 20 cm from the curb instead of the maximum allowable 15 cm, or a car is 199 cm from a hydrant instead of the required 200 cm, or some similar insignificant situation.
He documents these "transgressions", and submit it to the police. He calculates that he's brought the city hundreds of thousands of Euros in revenue.
Except the police ignore all of his reports because they're mostly nit-picky bullshit.
> Not many people die by cannibalism every year, do they? But are we suggesting that because not many people die by cannibalism, we don’t actually introduce legislation to outlaw it?
Uhm no because there are no downsides to a law against cannibalism. There are significant downsides to a law requiring number plates on bicycles. What an idiot.
[dead]
Since this site has a very international audience, it's quite important to make clear: there's not some road safety inspired reason for this. Mickey is an adrenaline junky who loves to start fights in public and he's found a way to do that in a mostly legal way. Sometimes, a little less legal, like when he lept onto the bonnet of a car in order to feign he'd been run over, or when he threw his bicycle into the path of an oncoming car endangering pretty much everyone in the situation (interestingly, a situation in which the author of this article seems to imply the car was to blame, not Mikey for deliberately throwing his bike into the path of the car, calculatingly not actually throwing himself into the path).
The guy has got sucked into a sort of spiral where he's going out to create these confrontations (partly to monetize on youtube), and he will, eventually cause some serious harm to himself or someone else. This article kind of misses that this isn't a story about road safety, it's more a story about how people can self-radicalise and how social media has created a profit incentive for them to do so.
It's difficult to watch a motorist threaten to take his own life if this guy reports him and then remember that actually, that's happening for ad revenue.
So, don't fuck around with your phone while driving. Stick to the traffic rules. Avoiding him seems really, really easy.
Anyone who chooses to grab their phone while driving a car deserves all the negativity they get. Unlearn that habit. Seek help if you're addicted to that device. Or just take the Tube.
Yeah this is the animosity I'm talking about. I'd just point out that this also translates to drivers showing that animosity to cyclists on the streets in London.
There's a huge difference between "animosity" because someone is endangering your life and "animosity" because you're stuck in traffic and don't like seeing a cyclist making progress. Most of the "animosity" from drivers is due to them not thinking clearly about the situation and also being aggressive bullies.
And what about the people he harasses who are literally stopped?
If you're queuing in traffic or stopped at some lights, then you're still in control of a big metal machine on the road and have a responsibility to have your attention on the road. If you're distracted then you might not notice a situation where you need to move the car aside in order to prevent an accident from escalating.
You mean he harasses the people who are so entitled that when called out on their dangerous and illegal driving they get confrontational?
I think a lot of these are while idling at traffic lights and tbh, I have a little sympathy
Does the law say that’s OK?
If not, the driver is still in the wrong.
It's trivial to find laws that the majority of Hacker News posters (and you) find abhorrent. Do you really equate law with moral correctness?
So, in general, you support vigilantes?
In my mind vigilante implies actually doing something to the criminal above and beyond documenting what they’re doing.
“a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate)”
That’s from Miriam Webster. I’d say he isn’t punishing crime, I could see an argument that he’s suppressing it, but it doesn’t really fit my normal view of the word.
Running into traffic to pick a fight with them? Throwing your bike in front of their car to cause a collision? Jumping onto their bonnet to try and pretend you're being run over?
The guy is quite literally taking the law into his own hands and it's very clear that running around trying to cause car accidents is making people less safe, not more. In many cases the "accident" he claims to want to prevent is caused by his actions.
That not really how it works though. Laws and morals do not perfectly align even in mostly civilised countries like the UK.
More importantly, laws are written under the tacit assumption that they won't be perfectly enforced. Have you ever driven 31 mph in a 30 mph zone? Illegal! You're in the wrong!
I have never watched his videos so I don't know what proportion of his videos are of people stopped at lights briefly looking at their phone... but I don't think many people (even cyclists) would seriously object to that.
I both cycle and drive a lot. There are a lot of bad drivers that I wish would get snitched. But I also occasionally look at my phone while waiting at a red light.
Mikey might have a profit incentive at play, but let's be abundantly clear - the drivers he is catching are frequently flagrantly breaking the law and endangering both themselves and the people around them. I have a very hard time feeling sympathy for those who are unable or unwilling to operate a car safely on public roads.
It doesn’t have to be zero sum
A stopped driver on his phone is endangering literally nobody.
Until they drive off while still looking at it, like the woman who drove through a pedestrian crossing a couple of weeks ago and almost hit me while I was walking across.
Then they aren't stopped any more, and therefore the parent poster's statement no longer applies to them.
I think a little reasoning at global scale easily arrives at a defence of the current traffic law depending on risk tolerance, but perhaps an analogy will help: most societies believe (or at least enforce in a manner that reflects belief) that walking around with a handgun out in your hand should be illegal. In truth no harm is done until one pulls the trigger, and there is certainly benefit: it is much faster to stop a criminal when you're ready at hand.
The reasons we don't do that are manifold, but at least a few are analogous:
* legibility: we don't need just lack of harm, we require common knowledge that harm is unlikely in order for society to work with frictionlessness we desire
* distinguishability: at some percentage of accidental behaviour, we must constrain all people because we don't have a mechanism to determine who will likely cause it and who won't
* reversibility: for sufficient harm, it is better to restrict the error condition than it is to punish
Because we know we cannot bring the dead back to life, and no amount of prison will bring solace to their loved ones, we have decided that doing things that are high-risk to others is not permissible. Given this framework for the moral concern, it's just an optimization problem. The question then becomes what fraction of pedestrians killed in crosswalks is acceptable, or even what fraction of pedestrians following the law killed in crosswalks is acceptable. Some societies believe this should be zero (hence the amusingly named Vision Zero and so on as practised in Northern Europe). Others believe this should be fairly high (like the US) because the utility loss from constraint is too high.
Now the handgun case has a very high number for potential risk, so it's obvious why most societies have that law. The crossing point of risk for almost everyone is below it, consequently most agree. The question then becomes what your crossing point for risk is and whether the number of accidental deaths is above your threshold or below your threshold. But in either case, I don't think the argument "until they hurt someone, no harm is done, and therefore it should be permissible" holds, for if it did, surely we would allow for people walking around with handguns, perhaps even pointed directly in front of them as they walk, so long as they do not pull the trigger. And that seems to be an absurdity.
The specificity of handgun versus firearms in general belies the weakness of the argument. Would it matter in the thought experiment if it were a long gun?
The status of open carry legality in a US state is not correlated with firearms violence rates. Firearm prevalence in general is.
I support Vision Zero. It has a sound logical and statistical basis.
Vision Zero is orthogonal to a law against using a mobile telephone while operating a vehicle that is stopped.
Science disagrees, 25% of road accidents and injuries happen at junctions. Looking at a phone can cause mental delays/reaction of upto 2 seconds
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
You made two claims, and provided no evidence that one is related to the other.
Yours is the most elegant refutation of the parent post.
If the vehicle is not moving at all, there's no way that you can cause an accident by looking at your phone. Because you aren't moving.
I almost can't beleive adults are having this conversation.
You have never been sitting at a light, and see everone around you with their heads down, while the light has been green for 4 seconds?
Inverse, Have you ever been rear ended because a person staring down at their phone at a red light just decides to roll forward because someones brake lights in the pack deluminate for a moment?
I ask, because point 1 happens to me daily, and point 2 has put my car in the shop for weeks twice in the last 5 years.
A totally separate point to make; what could you possibly be doing on the phone? Like how addicted to social media or work must one be that they wait for the briefest of moments to distract themselves? I ask that not to judge or poke fun, but to say that you MUST be doing something that you find so important, and thus taking your attention, that it is now your priority. Or else, you would choose to wait.
I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know what people are talking about here.
I can stay parked at a green light the entire cycle, and it still will be 100% the fault of the person who rear ends me.
As for what I'm doing, it's probably something like scrolling the map to see what road I'll be turning on in 5 minutes, so that I don't have to look at it (regardless of whether I'd be touching it) later. Or a dozen other similar things, none of which have anything to do with social media.
And I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know this.
Perhaps not while you’re not moving, but when you suddenly realise that the traffic light has changed to green and move off in a rush while distracted without having been monitoring the traffic, don’t you think that it’s more likely you’ll be hit by the truck that rolled through the lights as it turned red?
I agree with this statement.
Other drivers are doing dangerous actions. For example, the embedded video in the article showed a driver crash into his bicycle as he crossed the street. That driver then departed the scene. Hit and run is culturally and legally offensive in the UK and the rest of the OECD.
You ought to petition the government to change the law then, not the guy reporting people breaking the law.
Bet you'd be fun in 1940's germany.
You're comparing someone reporting a person using a mobile phone while driving to the atrocities committed by Nazis?
I'm comparing someone getting off on reporting people to the authorities to people who got off on reporting people to the authorities. It's the same self-righteous attitude either way.
Throwing a bike would be impressive, but he clearly didn't throw it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9q_q7cNWbE
The car was stationary until just before he stepped out and the driver already knew to expect that he would do so. It does seem that Mikey had time to avoid the crash though.
TLDW: Mike's bike gets hit by a driver committing 7 different traffic offenses. The Internet blames Mike.
In future, if you think he's on the right side, link to the video of him doing it, not an 8 minute video talking around the fact he did it. There was no reason for the bicycle to enter the carriage way other than to come directly into the path of the vehicle. People think there's some sort of "Oh well if what you're doing isn't following the highway code then I can do ANYTHING and you're at fault" attitude, and it just isn't true. The driver shouldn't have gone that direction and Mikey shouldn't have caused the crash.
People shouldn't break the law while driving. What Cycling Mikey is doing is ill-advised and dangerous.
Throwing an ebike is pretty impressive cause they're big and bulky. A regular road bike isn't too bad... hard to get a lot of distance, but you can toss them a bit. Rolling them is easier, if you push hard enough and they're reasonably balanced you'll get some good distance before they fall over.
At most, this was rolling it into traffic, but my view is he had a hand on the handlebar until right around the collision, so he was just walking with his bike.
But WTF is that traffic configuration? Why are people trying to drive through that lane in the wrong direction? Seems like a good way to get a head-on with a car in addition to pedestrians that weren't expecting a wrong way driver.
Vehicle operators usually have a duty not to proceed unless safe, even when they have right of way, I'm not sure how much that duty applies to pedestrians or if natural consequences is enough.
That's exactly what Mr. Loophole would say. Mickey risking his life for ad revenue. Sure. Mickey throwing his bike in front of a speeding vehicle, when he clearly dismounted before getting struck. Sorry mate, I live, drive and cycle in a country with the highest road fatalities in the EU. I think its unfair to take it out on Mickey.
He clearly is. It takes a certain type of personality to go around starting fights with people over trivialities in the first place.
I wonder how long it is until some driver just has an 'accident' and hits this guy. For the most part he's not making streets safer, but just costing people money.
Reminds me of the mpls bike wraith[0] guy, someone just going around looking for trouble.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/guy-on-a-bike-bike-wr...
> For the most part he's not making streets safer, but just costing people money.
It's not just a fine when caught using your phone while driving, it's also 6 penalty points (of a maximum 12). Being caught a second time (or if you are within 2 years of earning your license) results in a ban from driving for 6 months.
People who are caught once will likely think twice about using their phone again, not wanting to risk the ban.
That doesn't make anything better. No one deserves points for checking a phone briefly while a vehicle is stopped at a red light. In the long run, problems like Mikey sort themselves out - Darwin at work.
If no one deserves points for checking a phone briefly while a vehicle is stopped at a red light, then either the police can decide not to act on video footage showing someone doing this, or the law should be changed.
Sure, the law should be changed, and I'm sure the police frequently do decide to ignore it. But then you have this dipshit vigilante endangering himself, causing tension and handing them a free win (i.e. free money), so of course they take it.
Two things can be true: checking a phone while stopped hurts nobody and should not be illegal. Driving the wrong way in an intersection and nearly hitting a cyclist is dangerous and this activity should be curbed.
These are two separate, unrelated things, so them both being true is no surprise.
I agree. Which is why the second scenario should be considered in your analysis of this Youtuber, not just the first.
If he was only harassing people who were actually a danger, there wouldn't be much to complain about. But he isn't, he'll harass whoever he can for clicks and ego.
I lean toward your understanding of the topic but experience discomfort toward your framing, which implies a desire or at least apathy to the harm of this Youtuber.
This content creator is undoubtedly seeking conflicts with people and shrouding it in concerns for traffic safety.
Furthermore, most driving fatalities are spatially correlated— road design influences driver behavior more than other factors.
However, there is merit to noxious individuals raising an issue to the level of public consciousness.
It is also possible that the trajectory of traffic calming measures is already good in the UK and would not benefit from additional public exposure.
> experience discomfort toward your framing, which implies a desire or at least apathy to the harm of this Youtuber.
Apathy certainly, because:
> This content creator is undoubtedly seeking conflicts with people and shrouding it in concerns for traffic safety.
My attitude then, is that whatever happens he brought on himself.
i would like to refer anyone who calls cyclists "entitled" to this comment