Safety & Rules
A Near Miss Is Information, Not Just a Bad Moment
The incidents that leave no mark are the ones that outnumber everything else. Treated as data rather than adrenaline, they change your route and sometimes the road.
What follows is an argument about near miss reporting, and about where the received version of it stops being true.
The argument in brief
- Near misses vastly outnumber collisions and share their causes.
- Nothing that is not recorded appears in any official picture.
- The same location producing repeat incidents is the useful signal.
Why the ones that miss matter
For every collision on a road there are a great many incidents where the outcome was avoided by a small margin of time or space. Those incidents usually arise from the same causes as the ones that connect, which makes them a much larger sample of the same problem. They also happen where the design or the traffic pattern makes them likely, rather than randomly along a route.
That means a rider who pays attention to their own near misses is collecting a map of where their route is genuinely difficult. The pattern is only visible if the incidents are remembered rather than shaken off, which is the hard part.
The adrenaline problem
A near miss produces a strong physiological response, and that response makes the moment memorable in an emotional rather than analytical way. What tends to be retained is the anger and the sense of having been wronged, rather than the geometry of what happened. Riding on immediately afterwards while still activated is also a poor state for making decisions in traffic.
In the saddle, stopping for a minute, letting the response subside and then thinking about the sequence produces a much more useful account. That pause is worth building as a habit, because the analysis is where all the value is.
What to record
The location, the time, the direction each party was travelling and what the road looked like are the load-bearing details. Whether visibility was restricted, whether a queue was involved and what the surface was doing are the ones most often forgotten.
In the saddle, photographs of the location, taken later in daylight, are far more useful than a description written from memory. Assigning blame is the least useful part of the record and the part most accounts consist of. The question worth answering is what made the conflict likely, because that is the thing that can change.
Reporting, where reporting exists
Several countries have near-miss reporting schemes, run variously by transport authorities, police forces or research projects. Their coverage, their status and what happens to the data differ enormously, and many places have nothing at all. Where a scheme exists, reports accumulate into location data that can support a case for changing a junction.
The bit that actually matters: local authorities frequently respond to a cluster of reports at one location when they will not respond to a single complaint.
Where no scheme exists, reporting a dangerous location directly to whoever maintains the road is still the mechanism that gets things fixed.
Changing your own riding first
Some near misses point at something the rider can change, such as position, speed or where they were looking. Others point at a location that is simply difficult and will keep producing conflicts regardless of how well anyone rides. Distinguishing between the two is the useful judgement, and it is easier once several incidents have been recorded.
In the saddle, a route that produces repeated incidents at the same place is worth changing even if the alternative is slower. Nobody rides perfectly, and treating your own contribution as part of the analysis rather than an accusation is what makes it useful.
Frames, sizes and riding positions vary enormously; borrow before you buy wherever you can.
The wider picture that gets missed
Official casualty statistics record collisions, so any risk that mostly produces near misses is invisible in them. That skews infrastructure decisions towards places where people have already been hurt. It also means the experience of riders, who describe daily near misses, does not match the statistical picture decision-makers see.
Come the wet months, fear of traffic is one of the main reasons people give for not cycling, and near misses are what produce that fear. Making the invisible part of the problem visible is most of what a reporting habit achieves.
The takeaway
Write down where it happened rather than who was to blame, and after six months you will have something genuinely useful.
The bike you ride daily beats the better bike you keep indoors.
Questions readers ask
Is it worth reporting a near miss if nobody was hurt?
Where a scheme exists, yes, because clusters of reports at one location are what supports a case for changing it. Where none exists, reporting the location to the road authority is still the mechanism that gets a design looked at.
What should I write down after a near miss?
Location, time, direction of travel, what the road looked like and what restricted anyone's view. Photographs of the location taken later are more useful than a description. Skip the part about whose fault it was.
