In what may be the most spectacularly backfired act of civic righteousness in British history, a cyclist who reported a driver for bad driving has been handed a £1,200 fine for — you guessed it — bad cycling. The universe, it turns out, has a wicked sense of irony and apparently also a dashcam.
The unnamed cyclist, presumably feeling very good about themselves as they pedaled off to report a motorist’s dodgy driving, likely did not anticipate that the very footage submitted to authorities would become Exhibit A in their own prosecution. It’s the vehicular equivalent of calling the police about your neighbor’s loud party and having them arrest you for noise violations on the way over.
UK police, reviewing the submitted video evidence, apparently noticed that the cyclist’s own road behavior left something to be desired — and decided that if they were going to be in the business of handing out consequences, they’d be thorough about it. You have to admire the commitment to equal opportunity enforcement, even if the cyclist in question probably does not.
The result: a £1,200 fixed penalty notice for the cyclist, which is a fairly expensive lesson in the dangers of drawing official attention to yourself. Legal experts and common-sense enthusiasts alike are calling this a textbook case of “be careful what you wish for,” with a generous side of “perhaps preview your own footage before submitting it as evidence.”
The original driver’s fate remains unclear, which means there’s a non-trivial chance both parties ended up worse off than if everyone had simply carried on being mildly terrible at using the road in peaceful, undocumented anonymity.
Somewhere, a driving instructor is using this story as a lesson. For everyone.
Source: BBC News
Original story via Reddit Offbeat
