> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to (idly) consider play-doh with thermite in it on the hood of the car double parked in the bike lane. But then I moved to NYC where nothing would be possible without a little double parking happening.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're missing the very important distinction between illegal driving that can and does kill and injure other people, and "technically illegal" acts that do no harm.
Can you understand why the rule of law is used to prevent people causing harm to others?
I think it's nonsense to harass people for technically illegal things that are not harming anyone.
I think it would be fantastic if Mikey was passive in filming actual illegal acts that had potential for death or injury.
I don't approve of him inserting himself into situations to try and intervene because I think that just increased the potential for an accident or other undesirable outcome.
You keep implying that drivers distracting themselves with their phone whilst stopped in traffic are harmless, whereas it's very dangerous - that's precisely why the law was drafted to specifically make even just holding a phone whilst in control of a motor vehicle to be illegal.
Drivers are not able to quickly switch contexts between staring at a phone and looking around their vehicle and this "whatsapp-gap" is painfully obvious when cycling past slow/stopped traffic. It does lead to collisions with other road users - typically pedestrians and cyclists as drivers tend to only bother looking for other car-shaped vehicles and even more so when they're in the 30 second re-adjustment of their attention.
There is no "safe" use of a phone when driving - even using it in a cradle/hands-free which is legal in the UK, leads to a higher level of distraction and there would be a strong argument for making that illegal too, but we should focus more on enforcement of the existing traffic laws.
There's people like Mikey trying to make the world a bit better, and then there's people like you who make apologies for dangerous and illegal drivers. Maybe you should re-examine your attitude.
> You keep implying that drivers distracting themselves with their phone whilst stopped in traffic are harmless, whereas it's very dangerous - that's precisely why the law was drafted to specifically make even just holding a phone whilst in control of a motor vehicle to be illegal.
It's not dangerous at all. Checking a text message at a red light for significantly less duration than the red light is by definition harmless.
> There's people like Mikey trying to make the world a bit better, and then there's people like you who make apologies for dangerous and illegal drivers. Maybe you should re-examine your attitude.
I have no need. Mikey is in it for the ego and the guise of 'making the world a bit better'. Anyone who can't see that needs to take a step back and reexamine their assumptions.
Checking a text message at a red light affects drivers' ability to focus and recognise what's going on around then. You might as well say that drinking a shot of whisky at a red light for significantly less duration than the red light is harmless.
Mikey is absolutely not an egotist - you're just pushing some nasty little agenda of your own by trying to cast doubt on his reasons. His father was killed by a drunk driver and he now attempts to work with the police to catch drivers in illegal behaviour before someone else is hurt and killed.
If you do much road cycling in the UK, it becomes painfully obvious that there's a significant proportion of drivers that do not know how to drive safely or how to pay sufficient attention to what they are doing. I use front and back cameras in an attempt to similarly record bad driving and submit it to the police - it's a small attempt to make the roads safer. I certainly don't put as much time and effort in as Mikey, but I know exactly where he is coming from and it's just ridiculous when people think he does it for the recognition.
> Checking a text message at a red light affects drivers' ability to focus and recognise what's going on around then.
This is nonsense. Cite some studies to support your point if you like, but I doubt you will find any. Most people can check a message responsibly.
The countries that don't make doing so illegal don't tend to have worse accident rates. There's really nothing to support your belief.
> Mikey is absolutely not an egotist
He absolutely is. It's why he forces himself into situations. Not to mention he benfits financially from doing so.
> he now attempts to work with the police
He doesn't work 'with' the police, he forwards footage, that's it.
> to catch drivers in illegal behaviour before someone else is hurt and killed.
He catches some dangerous behavior, he also catches harmless behavior that is common and costs people money. I wish him all the worst.
> I use front and back cameras in an attempt to similarly record bad driving and submit it to the police - it's a small attempt to make the roads safer.
Are you ever worried about someone jacking the cameras if you have an accident?
The problem with trying to justify phone use when driving is the "normalisation" effect. People may start off being ultra careful with phone use, but unless there's some process to warn them, they end up using their phone more and more. One advantage of Mikey's shopping in of phone users is that it provides at least some negative adjustment of drivers' phone use.
I won't address your remarks about Mikey as they are largely matters of opinion, though I seriously doubt that he makes anything more than pocket change from his work and likely that is swallowed up by the costs incurred with buying bike cams.
As far as "working" with the police, that's very much the line that the police bring out for encouraging the public to submit video evidence of traffic offences.
"Harmless behaviour that is common" - as discussed, the behaviour is not harmless which is precisely why the phone use law was introduced and why the police are interested in prosecuting for it. Luckily, it's only a fraction of drivers that do injure others due to phone use, but the same can be said for speeding etc. The idea is to try to prevent careless/dangerous driving that will predictably lead to a greater chance of a collision (NB not an accident as accidents are unavoidable and unpredictable).
> Are you ever worried about someone jacking the cameras if you have an accident?
Again, "accident" is better replaced with "collision" as "accident" implies that it's uncontrollable and "just one of those things", whereas the vast majority of collisions are due to driver behaviour such as lack of attention, speeding etc. (I tend to think of "accident" as something like a tree falling onto your vehicle). I've thought about what would happen if a driver did try to grab my cameras, but it would seem to be a very low probability event - I frequent https://road.cc and there's often rider submitted videos of terrible driving and there's very few where the driver has attempted to grab a camera and I can't think of any where they've been successful. I'm fairly tall and muscular, so I don't think I'd be an obvious target and I try to not react emotionally to close passes, though that does take some practise.
My wife had one incident where she was shouting at a driver that dangerously obstructed her on a roundabout (i.e. he pulled straight out ahead of her when she was already on it) and he ended up going all the way round the roundabout in order to follow her. She was turning left just afterwards and he deliberately tried to swing the front of his car at her, either to scare, intimidate or injure her just after the corner - she shouted something like "it's on camera, b*ch" as she has trouble with emotional regulation. He then went ahead and pulled into a side road and exited his car, so he might have been about to assault her, but luckily her journey was about 50m further along at her mum's house, so she didn't find out. The police took her report and video seriously.
> I am indeed biased (I walk/cycle and don't drive), but that is irrelevant.
It's really not, not if it's informing your view more than fact and reason is.
I applaud you for providing some data (although none peer reviewed and published in standard journals from what I can see), but I have to be skeptical of their results.
Look at rideshare drivers as a counter - they typically have their phones mounted, and see new jobs, texts etc as they come in. If phones were so damaging, don't you think rideshare drivers would be involved in more incidents than most, and an uptick in accidents since ride-sharing became normal? Nothing like that has happened, though.
If the average is 23 seconds, I assume there's some elderly people skewing things, and the mode might be much closer to 5 or 10 seconds. The average in this case could very much be non-representative.
> People may start off being ultra careful with phone use, but unless there's some process to warn them, they end up using their phone more and more.
You could say this for anything though. By all means have zero tolerance and harsh penalties for using a phone while the vehicle is in motion, but I think some places even have laws punishing using a phone in the drivers seat in a parked car, which is just ridiculous.
> As far as "working" with the police, that's very much the line that the police bring out for encouraging the public to submit video evidence of traffic offences.
Sure.
> "Harmless behaviour that is common" - as discussed, the behaviour is not harmless which is precisely why the phone use law was introduced and why the police are interested in prosecuting for it.
I don't think you've made your case that the behavior is not harmless, and a more cynical guess at a motive might just be easy money.
> I don't think you've made your case that the behavior is not harmless, and a more cynical guess at a motive might just be easy money.
Well, I've provided some evidence that demonstrates that phone use is far more distracting than people believe - it's similar in my mind to the various tests of human perception such as "The Invisible Gorilla" whereby the brain fools people into thinking that they are perceptive and can see obvious objects, but actually testing their perception shows up a big mismatch between their expectations and their actual performance.
Presumably, the "easy money" you refer to is providing an incentive to police forces to prosecute phone using drivers, but the fines go to central government, not the local police forces, so apart from statistics, they have little incentive apart from the obvious traffic safety argument. Often, police forces seek to send a warning letter as it's easier for them to do so - that demonstrates that they are not focussing on fine revenues and are attempting to educate the problematic drivers.
One aspect we haven't touched upon is that it is a lot easier to prosecute drivers for using a phone whilst in control of a vehicle rather than only prosecuting drivers using a phone whilst in motion. I don't have a problem with drivers who pull in to the side of the road to use their phone, though the law does state that they should turn off their engine to do so. The difference between that and being stuck in traffic is that they have control over when they choose to rejoin the traffic flow and won't just blindly follow what they think the driver in front is doing.
This does remind me of an incident I had a while back. I was cycling along a dual carriageway and a tractor driver behind me used his horn aggressively (i.e. there was nothing that required the horn use) and then overtook. I passed him at the next set of lights at a roundabout and noticed that he was visibly using his phone, so of course the police got the full video (they require two minutes before and after incidents anyhow) and I was smugly satisfied to catch him out as aggressive behaviour can be down to interpretation, but not the phone use.
> Well, I've provided some evidence that demonstrates that phone use is far more distracting than people believe
But as I said, the average is not necessarily representative at all. Also, at least one of the sources would benefit from showing the problem to be bigger than it is.
> they have little incentive apart from the obvious traffic safety argument.
I don't believe so. They've undoubtedly got various performance measures for the various police forces, but I don't think they have a simple arrest quota for individual officers. If they did have to ramp up their numbers, then I think it'd be an easy job for a cycling officer with a camera to go around and capture all the blatant phone use. Unfortunately, when Avon&Somerset police (my area) provide a positive response to video submissions, they use a standard phrase like "As a result of this report I can confirm a positive outcome in that the driver(s) identified in the submission(s) will receive either a warning letter, a fixed penalty or a prosecution." which doesn't provide much feedback as to what action they are taking (a warning letter is barely an action though I do think they're a good idea). I have also had responses where they also mention a possible NIP (notice of intended prosecution).
As a counter-example of police just looking to make easy arrests, there plenty of reports on https://road.cc where certain forces (e.g. Lancashire) seem to bend over backwards to not take any action on cyclist submitted videos. It's a bit of a lottery as to which areas take things like close passes seriously or not.
yes but the difference is the top 10 villains list for the uk is a citizen cyclist enforcing traffic rules, school dinners and the football replay system.
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.
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.
> unwilling to acknowledge the excesses and poor behaviour of cyclists
when talking about the echo chambers, aren't you painting all cyclists with the same brush here?
And even if that were the case, why do you think he should fight that battle? He chooses to go after reckless car drivers, who cause thousands of deaths per year (including his father's). Why would you expect him to engage in this whataboutism on bicyclists?
I didn't think I needed to respond to a comment that (I guess willingly) missed the mark.
> don't endanger other people's lives
> Cyclists certainly endanger people
Your article talks about 600 injuries caused by cyclists, I am talking about 15000 deaths a year caused by cars. And you try to frame it as a "both sides bad (but actually cyclists are worse because of their entitlement and bad behavior)"
by the way just by looking at a few of his videos he never excuses cyclists not following the rules and even calls them out https://youtu.be/FnBaO747PZw?t=666
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are two daily occurrences contradicting that:
1. The driver realizes out of their peripheral vision that the light has changed but wants to finish the urgent TikTok they’re watching so they accelerate, often rapidly, without looking around and fails to notice other road users. I’ve seen people hit other cars because they didn’t notice the car ahead of them had stopped accelerating due to congestion, and countless times where they almost or did hit someone (fortunately never fatally) in the crosswalk because they were in “green means go mode” before they were fully back to looking outside their vehicle.
2. The driver continues to look at their phone and fails to notice when the light changes. Someone behind them gets mad and does something dangerous to pass such as driving in the opposite traffic lane, a bike lane, or in a pedestrian space.
Yes, many people do look at phones without hitting anyone but that’s like saying it’s okay to celebrate by firing a gun in the air because only a few people get hit. It’s a statistical certainty that the more times someone engages in unsafe activity, the more people will be on the unlucky side of those odds. If you have a couple million daily car trips in London, even 99.9999% safety means someone getting hurt every day.
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.
With all due respect, I could not imagine one thing, nor a dozen, that would involve me fiddling with my phone while on a commute of any length.
I say this having both a vehicle with wireless carplay, and another where I need to manually configure maps. And yes, I often fiddle with maps as I'm a nervous wreck, but I truly cannot imagine doing it "on the fly".
my company does not pay me enough to hyper scan my phone for teams/outlook, nor does my interest in "task/notification x" trump my desire to not have my car in the shop for weeks.
Different strokes I guess. I'm sure you're a safe driver all things considered.
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'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.
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.
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.
Er, in future, don't repeat claims like "he threw a bike" when the footage doesn't show him throwing a bike?
Noting that I didn't say or think that he's in the right for the collision and the video I linked (which was the first that I found showing the situation before the viral moment) concludes that both were in the wrong, as noted in its description.
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.
> 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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I used to (idly) consider play-doh with thermite in it on the hood of the car double parked in the bike lane. But then I moved to NYC where nothing would be possible without a little double parking happening.
i'd love to see a computer game like GTA with those features.
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
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.
What an interesting long-form portrait.
Looking at your phone while driving is extremely dangerous, please don’t do it.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
We already do similar stuff for oil, uranium, and cobalt.
There is nobody as entitled as a driver.
[flagged]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're missing the very important distinction between illegal driving that can and does kill and injure other people, and "technically illegal" acts that do no harm.
Can you understand why the rule of law is used to prevent people causing harm to others?
I'm not missing that distinction at all.
I think it's nonsense to harass people for technically illegal things that are not harming anyone.
I think it would be fantastic if Mikey was passive in filming actual illegal acts that had potential for death or injury.
I don't approve of him inserting himself into situations to try and intervene because I think that just increased the potential for an accident or other undesirable outcome.
You keep implying that drivers distracting themselves with their phone whilst stopped in traffic are harmless, whereas it's very dangerous - that's precisely why the law was drafted to specifically make even just holding a phone whilst in control of a motor vehicle to be illegal.
Drivers are not able to quickly switch contexts between staring at a phone and looking around their vehicle and this "whatsapp-gap" is painfully obvious when cycling past slow/stopped traffic. It does lead to collisions with other road users - typically pedestrians and cyclists as drivers tend to only bother looking for other car-shaped vehicles and even more so when they're in the 30 second re-adjustment of their attention.
There is no "safe" use of a phone when driving - even using it in a cradle/hands-free which is legal in the UK, leads to a higher level of distraction and there would be a strong argument for making that illegal too, but we should focus more on enforcement of the existing traffic laws.
There's people like Mikey trying to make the world a bit better, and then there's people like you who make apologies for dangerous and illegal drivers. Maybe you should re-examine your attitude.
> You keep implying that drivers distracting themselves with their phone whilst stopped in traffic are harmless, whereas it's very dangerous - that's precisely why the law was drafted to specifically make even just holding a phone whilst in control of a motor vehicle to be illegal.
It's not dangerous at all. Checking a text message at a red light for significantly less duration than the red light is by definition harmless.
> There's people like Mikey trying to make the world a bit better, and then there's people like you who make apologies for dangerous and illegal drivers. Maybe you should re-examine your attitude.
I have no need. Mikey is in it for the ego and the guise of 'making the world a bit better'. Anyone who can't see that needs to take a step back and reexamine their assumptions.
You are utterly wrong.
Checking a text message at a red light affects drivers' ability to focus and recognise what's going on around then. You might as well say that drinking a shot of whisky at a red light for significantly less duration than the red light is harmless.
Mikey is absolutely not an egotist - you're just pushing some nasty little agenda of your own by trying to cast doubt on his reasons. His father was killed by a drunk driver and he now attempts to work with the police to catch drivers in illegal behaviour before someone else is hurt and killed.
If you do much road cycling in the UK, it becomes painfully obvious that there's a significant proportion of drivers that do not know how to drive safely or how to pay sufficient attention to what they are doing. I use front and back cameras in an attempt to similarly record bad driving and submit it to the police - it's a small attempt to make the roads safer. I certainly don't put as much time and effort in as Mikey, but I know exactly where he is coming from and it's just ridiculous when people think he does it for the recognition.
He is NOT that kind of guy.
> You are utterly wrong.
I'm not, so much as you are heavily biased.
> Checking a text message at a red light affects drivers' ability to focus and recognise what's going on around then.
This is nonsense. Cite some studies to support your point if you like, but I doubt you will find any. Most people can check a message responsibly.
The countries that don't make doing so illegal don't tend to have worse accident rates. There's really nothing to support your belief.
> Mikey is absolutely not an egotist
He absolutely is. It's why he forces himself into situations. Not to mention he benfits financially from doing so.
> he now attempts to work with the police
He doesn't work 'with' the police, he forwards footage, that's it.
> to catch drivers in illegal behaviour before someone else is hurt and killed.
He catches some dangerous behavior, he also catches harmless behavior that is common and costs people money. I wish him all the worst.
> I use front and back cameras in an attempt to similarly record bad driving and submit it to the police - it's a small attempt to make the roads safer.
Are you ever worried about someone jacking the cameras if you have an accident?
I am indeed biased (I walk/cycle and don't drive), but that is irrelevant.
Studies show "up to 27 seconds" to fully re-focus after using a phone: https://www.science.org/content/article/talking-car-or-smart...
Average of 23 seconds: https://www.cmtelematics.com/blog/the-distraction-hangover-p...
Not sure if this is rigorous, but 34% of crashes occur within 60 seconds of phone distraction: https://www.onfocus.news/new-study-34-of-crashes-happen-with...
The problem with trying to justify phone use when driving is the "normalisation" effect. People may start off being ultra careful with phone use, but unless there's some process to warn them, they end up using their phone more and more. One advantage of Mikey's shopping in of phone users is that it provides at least some negative adjustment of drivers' phone use.
I won't address your remarks about Mikey as they are largely matters of opinion, though I seriously doubt that he makes anything more than pocket change from his work and likely that is swallowed up by the costs incurred with buying bike cams.
As far as "working" with the police, that's very much the line that the police bring out for encouraging the public to submit video evidence of traffic offences.
"Harmless behaviour that is common" - as discussed, the behaviour is not harmless which is precisely why the phone use law was introduced and why the police are interested in prosecuting for it. Luckily, it's only a fraction of drivers that do injure others due to phone use, but the same can be said for speeding etc. The idea is to try to prevent careless/dangerous driving that will predictably lead to a greater chance of a collision (NB not an accident as accidents are unavoidable and unpredictable).
> Are you ever worried about someone jacking the cameras if you have an accident?
Again, "accident" is better replaced with "collision" as "accident" implies that it's uncontrollable and "just one of those things", whereas the vast majority of collisions are due to driver behaviour such as lack of attention, speeding etc. (I tend to think of "accident" as something like a tree falling onto your vehicle). I've thought about what would happen if a driver did try to grab my cameras, but it would seem to be a very low probability event - I frequent https://road.cc and there's often rider submitted videos of terrible driving and there's very few where the driver has attempted to grab a camera and I can't think of any where they've been successful. I'm fairly tall and muscular, so I don't think I'd be an obvious target and I try to not react emotionally to close passes, though that does take some practise.
My wife had one incident where she was shouting at a driver that dangerously obstructed her on a roundabout (i.e. he pulled straight out ahead of her when she was already on it) and he ended up going all the way round the roundabout in order to follow her. She was turning left just afterwards and he deliberately tried to swing the front of his car at her, either to scare, intimidate or injure her just after the corner - she shouted something like "it's on camera, b*ch" as she has trouble with emotional regulation. He then went ahead and pulled into a side road and exited his car, so he might have been about to assault her, but luckily her journey was about 50m further along at her mum's house, so she didn't find out. The police took her report and video seriously.
> I am indeed biased (I walk/cycle and don't drive), but that is irrelevant.
It's really not, not if it's informing your view more than fact and reason is.
I applaud you for providing some data (although none peer reviewed and published in standard journals from what I can see), but I have to be skeptical of their results.
Look at rideshare drivers as a counter - they typically have their phones mounted, and see new jobs, texts etc as they come in. If phones were so damaging, don't you think rideshare drivers would be involved in more incidents than most, and an uptick in accidents since ride-sharing became normal? Nothing like that has happened, though.
If the average is 23 seconds, I assume there's some elderly people skewing things, and the mode might be much closer to 5 or 10 seconds. The average in this case could very much be non-representative.
> People may start off being ultra careful with phone use, but unless there's some process to warn them, they end up using their phone more and more.
You could say this for anything though. By all means have zero tolerance and harsh penalties for using a phone while the vehicle is in motion, but I think some places even have laws punishing using a phone in the drivers seat in a parked car, which is just ridiculous.
> As far as "working" with the police, that's very much the line that the police bring out for encouraging the public to submit video evidence of traffic offences.
Sure.
> "Harmless behaviour that is common" - as discussed, the behaviour is not harmless which is precisely why the phone use law was introduced and why the police are interested in prosecuting for it.
I don't think you've made your case that the behavior is not harmless, and a more cynical guess at a motive might just be easy money.
> The police took her report and video seriously.
That's good.
> I don't think you've made your case that the behavior is not harmless, and a more cynical guess at a motive might just be easy money.
Well, I've provided some evidence that demonstrates that phone use is far more distracting than people believe - it's similar in my mind to the various tests of human perception such as "The Invisible Gorilla" whereby the brain fools people into thinking that they are perceptive and can see obvious objects, but actually testing their perception shows up a big mismatch between their expectations and their actual performance.
Presumably, the "easy money" you refer to is providing an incentive to police forces to prosecute phone using drivers, but the fines go to central government, not the local police forces, so apart from statistics, they have little incentive apart from the obvious traffic safety argument. Often, police forces seek to send a warning letter as it's easier for them to do so - that demonstrates that they are not focussing on fine revenues and are attempting to educate the problematic drivers.
One aspect we haven't touched upon is that it is a lot easier to prosecute drivers for using a phone whilst in control of a vehicle rather than only prosecuting drivers using a phone whilst in motion. I don't have a problem with drivers who pull in to the side of the road to use their phone, though the law does state that they should turn off their engine to do so. The difference between that and being stuck in traffic is that they have control over when they choose to rejoin the traffic flow and won't just blindly follow what they think the driver in front is doing.
This does remind me of an incident I had a while back. I was cycling along a dual carriageway and a tractor driver behind me used his horn aggressively (i.e. there was nothing that required the horn use) and then overtook. I passed him at the next set of lights at a roundabout and noticed that he was visibly using his phone, so of course the police got the full video (they require two minutes before and after incidents anyhow) and I was smugly satisfied to catch him out as aggressive behaviour can be down to interpretation, but not the phone use.
> Well, I've provided some evidence that demonstrates that phone use is far more distracting than people believe
But as I said, the average is not necessarily representative at all. Also, at least one of the sources would benefit from showing the problem to be bigger than it is.
> they have little incentive apart from the obvious traffic safety argument.
Do they not have ticket quotas like US cops?
> Do they not have ticket quotas like US cops?
I don't believe so. They've undoubtedly got various performance measures for the various police forces, but I don't think they have a simple arrest quota for individual officers. If they did have to ramp up their numbers, then I think it'd be an easy job for a cycling officer with a camera to go around and capture all the blatant phone use. Unfortunately, when Avon&Somerset police (my area) provide a positive response to video submissions, they use a standard phrase like "As a result of this report I can confirm a positive outcome in that the driver(s) identified in the submission(s) will receive either a warning letter, a fixed penalty or a prosecution." which doesn't provide much feedback as to what action they are taking (a warning letter is barely an action though I do think they're a good idea). I have also had responses where they also mention a possible NIP (notice of intended prosecution).
As a counter-example of police just looking to make easy arrests, there plenty of reports on https://road.cc where certain forces (e.g. Lancashire) seem to bend over backwards to not take any action on cyclist submitted videos. It's a bit of a lottery as to which areas take things like close passes seriously or not.
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?
yes but the difference is the top 10 villains list for the uk is a citizen cyclist enforcing traffic rules, school dinners and the football replay system.
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.
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...
> unwilling to acknowledge the excesses and poor behaviour of cyclists
when talking about the echo chambers, aren't you painting all cyclists with the same brush here?
And even if that were the case, why do you think he should fight that battle? He chooses to go after reckless car drivers, who cause thousands of deaths per year (including his father's). Why would you expect him to engage in this whataboutism on bicyclists?
You are responding to a comment pointing out you had said something clearly false, but have not addressed it.
I didn't think I needed to respond to a comment that (I guess willingly) missed the mark.
> don't endanger other people's lives
> Cyclists certainly endanger people
Your article talks about 600 injuries caused by cyclists, I am talking about 15000 deaths a year caused by cars. And you try to frame it as a "both sides bad (but actually cyclists are worse because of their entitlement and bad behavior)"
by the way just by looking at a few of his videos he never excuses cyclists not following the rules and even calls them out https://youtu.be/FnBaO747PZw?t=666
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.
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.
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]
[flagged]
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are two daily occurrences contradicting that:
1. The driver realizes out of their peripheral vision that the light has changed but wants to finish the urgent TikTok they’re watching so they accelerate, often rapidly, without looking around and fails to notice other road users. I’ve seen people hit other cars because they didn’t notice the car ahead of them had stopped accelerating due to congestion, and countless times where they almost or did hit someone (fortunately never fatally) in the crosswalk because they were in “green means go mode” before they were fully back to looking outside their vehicle.
2. The driver continues to look at their phone and fails to notice when the light changes. Someone behind them gets mad and does something dangerous to pass such as driving in the opposite traffic lane, a bike lane, or in a pedestrian space.
Yes, many people do look at phones without hitting anyone but that’s like saying it’s okay to celebrate by firing a gun in the air because only a few people get hit. It’s a statistical certainty that the more times someone engages in unsafe activity, the more people will be on the unlucky side of those odds. If you have a couple million daily car trips in London, even 99.9999% safety means someone getting hurt every day.
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.
With all due respect, I could not imagine one thing, nor a dozen, that would involve me fiddling with my phone while on a commute of any length.
I say this having both a vehicle with wireless carplay, and another where I need to manually configure maps. And yes, I often fiddle with maps as I'm a nervous wreck, but I truly cannot imagine doing it "on the fly".
my company does not pay me enough to hyper scan my phone for teams/outlook, nor does my interest in "task/notification x" trump my desire to not have my car in the shop for weeks.
Different strokes I guess. I'm sure you're a safe driver all things considered.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Er, in future, don't repeat claims like "he threw a bike" when the footage doesn't show him throwing a bike?
Noting that I didn't say or think that he's in the right for the collision and the video I linked (which was the first that I found showing the situation before the viral moment) concludes that both were in the wrong, as noted in its description.
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.