In the video, a car almost strikes Paul McCabe, SNP, when the driver fails to give way as the councillor cycles his e-bike on a southside roundabout.
Cllr McCabe, who heads the Safe Glasgow Partnership, which scrutinises police and fire service operations in the city, is urging drivers “to be more observant”.
After the “near miss”, which left his hands like “jelly”, the councillor wants to highlight the dangers of driving at speed, saying: “Between 20 and 30mph, it’s a massive difference in terms of the injury you can cause.”
Cllr McCabe, who represents the Linn ward, had been returning from a visit to the new Govan-Partick bridge on Saturday, September 7 when the incident occurred.
He entered the roundabout — where the monument to the Battle of Langside stands — from Langside Road. He said: “You can see that he continually speeds up. He’s just going to go right through there without slowing down.
“I thought I was hit. It was slow motion… I’m just ready to come off the bike. God knows how dangerous this is going to be.
“I stopped and looked back, you can see how far over the give way sign he is. I put the bike down because my hands were all jelly.”
After the incident, Cllr McCabe pulled into a car park to calm down. He also spoke with the driver about the incident.
He said: “I think it’s important to highlight that this is how easy it is to create an accident. In terms of the speeds, if you’re speeding up in an SUV and you hit a bike, it’s going to be catastrophic.
“That could potentially have been catastrophic. It was literally a fraction of a second.”
Glasgow City Council is aiming to achieve ‘Vision Zero’ by 2030. “That’s when nobody gets killed or seriously injured on Glasgow’s roads,” Cllr McCabe explained.
He said people “need to change their behaviour”, make sure they drive at a safe speed and slow down at give way signs. “When you are coming to junctions, you have to slow down until it’s safe to go.”
Brake, the road safety charity, says the risk of injury increases exponentially with impact speed, with a crash at 30mph involving a lot more energy and destructive potential than a crash at 20mph.
Cllr McCabe said he hoped the driver would learn from the incident and urged cyclists who record footage of near misses to report them to Police Scotland.
There have been talks at the Safe Glasgow Partnership about collecting “near miss” data, but Cllr McCabe said it is difficult. He said one council in the UK collects the data, Tunbridge Wells, but they “don’t know what they are going to do with it”.
The council’s website states reports of an “incident where a collision has almost taken place on our roads involving vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, or horses” can be made, and will be reviewed to “assess if anything can be done locally to improve safety”.
Cllr McCabe said, as near misses happen so often, he “can’t see how Joe Public who have busy lives are going to be able to go home at night and upload videos”.
A Police Scotland spokeswoman said there had been “a report of careless driving which happened on Battlefield Road on Saturday, September 7”.
She added: “A 45-year-old man has been issued with a fixed penalty notice in connection with a road traffic offence.”
