Strava | Police Sting Catches Bad Drivers

Strava cyclist, Insp Kevin Smith, works for NW NHP, Sheffield Police (South Yorkshire Police) and was used to gather evidence in a sting operation near Oughtibridge to the North West of the City.

He repeatedly cycled sections of the road, taking images of dangerous drivers as he did so. This same sting operation has been previosuly repeated and this time around ‘only’ 4 offending vehicles were identified, 2 of which received tickets and another a police summons. It looks like the 4th person was only ‘a bit bad’ and in the UK that means you can get away without punishment if you attend a course for driving re-education.

I’ve posted the ride summary as an image above/right and the eagle-eyed amongst you will see that Insp Smith uses a Garmin Edge 520 Plus, a nice choice. However neither the Strava posting nor the Garmin are especially relavent to the deserved apprehension of the offenders. Strava is being used here for publicity, perhaps to assure cyclists that some Police forces are occasionally taking dangerous driving offences against cyclists seriously.

I guess we all welcome this?

Road.cc has an almost daily post of dangerous driving that affects cyclists, here is just one example. If you follow the weekly stream of bad driving supplied by readers on road.cc it is quite sobering, some incidents even end in filmed assaults on the innocent cyclist. Be careful out there. Smiling and waving is always the best policy, swearing and gesticulating eventually ends badly.

The original strava posting shows Insp Smith topping out at 52.9km/h on the steeper section (50mph speed limit) near the start of his route. Just in case any of you thought the policeman was speeding I included the speed sign in the image below 😉