Cycling Mikey: The Man 'Exposing' London’s Dangerous Drivers

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:01]Have you ever seen videos like this on your for you page?

[00:00:04]>> Back. Go back. You're on the wrong side of the road. Go back.

[00:00:07]>> In recent years, videos have emerged on social media showing alleged careless or dangerous driving captured every day by ordinary citizens. I've gone to meet the people taking the law into their own hands.

[00:00:19]>> I'd see what I'm doing as civic duty.

[00:00:21]Good civic duty.

[00:00:23]>> The people they've caught. I think if these vigilantes prevent one death, their actions are worth it. and the authorities who are responsible for keeping our roads safe.

[00:00:33]>> I absolutely believe there's less death on the road because the public are reporting road crime.

[00:00:41]>> In your car, on your cycle helmet, even in your doorbell, cameras are almost inescapable on Britain's roads these days. With thousands of hours of footage of our roads out there, most police forces in England and Wales now participate in Operation Snap, which allows members of the public to submit footage of dangerous or illegal driving.

[00:01:00]And for those looking to share their footage even further, there's social media. One doom scrolling session on Tik Tok or Instagram will often bring up dozens of viral videos from our roads.

[00:01:09]Some call it vigilantism, snitching, or even public shaming, whilst others say it's just fulfilling a public duty to keep our roads safe. But why are so many people taking traffic safety into their own hands? And is it now up to us to police our roads? One of the best known examples of the public taking policing into their own hands is Mike Vaner, better known as Cycling Mikey. The YouTuber has gone viral dozens of times for filming drivers in London allegedly committing traffic offenses, which he submits to the police and then posts online.

[00:01:40]>> You know that's going to the police, right? And on YouTube. Mike's reporting has led to convictions for the likes of Guy Richie and Chris Eubank. His bio on X boasts of reporting nearly 2.5,000 drivers to the police since 2019. Mike says this has resulted in almost 3,000 penalty points, over £175,000 in fines and 36 drivers disqualified.

[00:02:02]Unsurprisingly, this has received plenty of backlash. Mike tells me he sees what he does as good civic duty and believes people like him deter drivers from acting illegally on the roads.

[00:02:13]>> It's an a bit of an annoying duty. I don't really like it. It's it's admin and I I hate admin as much as the next person, but I think it's important for society. I started out doing it purely for my own safety and to try and change the ways of drivers around me on the bike. And I I noticed how well it worked. And then the Mets started prosecuting drivers from these reports.

[00:02:35]in about 2018 I think and then I suddenly came to the realization that I wouldn't just be helping myself but I'd be helping everyone else you know so then I started reporting much more actively if I catch that couple of hundred a year that's not that's a drop in the ocean compared to the traffic offenders you get on the road in the UK but because so many people have seen it and I've become like this this demon this on the shoulders of of drivers everybody's much more worried about being on the phone and lots more people are reporting and that's far more successful than anything I've done myself. If you look back to Sir Robert Peele, the the founder of modern policing and the Metropolitan Police, his seventh principle, something along the lines of everybody should be a policeman and only some of us are paid to be policemen. To me, that seems quite important. We should, you know, if I walk past someone getting beaten up, would I intervene? Of course I would.

[00:03:28]Operation Snap was launched by North Wales Police in 2016 and has since been rolled out by most police forces in England and Wales. This provides an online portal for the public to report video footage of non-emergency traffic offenses such as drivers using their mobile phones or running a red light. In London, the Metropolitan Police accepts reports through its single online home platform. A Freedom of Information request found there were 73,143 reports made to the Met between 2023 and 2025.

[00:03:57]Around 52% of these resulted in some form of enforcement action, whether that's fines, warning letters, or even prosecution.

[00:04:06]Andy Cox is Detective Chief Superintendent for Northamptonshire Police and has been involved with road crime reporting nationally. He believes that schemes like Operation SNAP have saved lives.

[00:04:16]>> I absolutely believe there's less death on the road because the public are reporting road crime. When you reflect on many more people dying on our roads than any other form of crime, why would we not ask the public to come forward and help us? The police can't be everywhere 24/7, but the public can be.

[00:04:33]And I very much feel uh if you were to look at the mindset of the dangerous driver. I think they look for the speed camera. They look for the police officer. If they see neither, they're minded to to drive more dangerously. If they know the person next to them, the average member of the public, whether that's a pedestrian holding their phone, able to access some footage and record stuff, whether that's dash cam, whether that's headcam, then they're more minded to perhaps drive more safely because they know an average member of the public can also report them and show their offending as well.

[00:05:03]>> For some, this does genuinely make a difference. I spoke to one Londoner who received six points on their license and a200 fine after being caught and reported by Mike for using their phone whilst in traffic a few years ago. They wished to remain anonymous but said in a way I'm grateful for the encounter as it definitely changed my relationship with my phone in my car. I've never touched it in the car since. It made me think more about the consequences. While the risk of harming someone whilst using a phone when stationary is low, it is against the law and I shouldn't have done it. It also made me reflect on what could happen if I ever use my phone whilst the car was moving. I never want to be responsible for causing injury or worse to someone. I think if these vigilantes prevent one death, their actions are worth it.

[00:05:51]>> I asked Mike what he made of those comments.

[00:05:54]I'm very touched by that that comment and I I have nothing but huge respect for that driver. You know, I don't dislike the people I catch by a couple of the most badly behaved ones and maybe I will dislike them. It's the behavior that I have a problem with. I want people to change. Yeah.

[00:06:10]>> The AA's head of roads policy, Jack Cousins, suggests people are recording their journeys on the road as a response to a perceived lack of adequate and visible policing on our roads. There has been over a number of years a real big loss in the number of road traffic officers out on the roads policing there and then. So I think with the rise of dash cams, drivers are trying to be a bit more proactive where they've got dash cam footage to send that on. What a camera can do is spot somebody misbehaving after the event. But what a traffic officer can do is intervene in the moment and discover the reason why they're driving dangerously is because they may be under the influence of drink or drugs. Really, what we need to see is a mix of both. It's absolutely fine for people to submit this camera footage, but what we really want to see is more cops in cars, more traffic officers out on the road doing that good community policing.

[00:07:04]>> The policing of our roads by people like Mike doesn't stop with reporting to the authorities. However, increasingly users are taking to social media to post clips of traffic incidents with a huge platform on Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube for videos like these. Pages such as Exposed UK dash cams have received millions of likes by posting compilations of such footage, with the comment sections on these videos filled with debate about who is responsible and criticism of the drivers at fault. Dr. Helen Wells is a criminologist at Kale University specializing in roads policing. She argues that posting footage on social media has a different set of motives to reporting to the police.

[00:07:42]>> What we found from speaking to people was that sometimes posting on social media was kind of a response to not getting the result they wanted from policing for whatever reason. Um that they actually felt they would um get more of a positive response from sharing it more widely. I think it's probably also we can't underestimate the fact that it's actually easier to post something online. And for some people, I guess what they want is actually more people to see it. They want actually to to say, I think this is unacceptable.

[00:08:10]What does the rest of the world think?

[00:08:12]And that's a kind of a different ask of the public to sending something into the police when only the police will see it.

[00:08:17]It kind of depends, I suppose, on what you want in terms of an outcome. Do you want to sort of see somebody named and shamed or do you want their their activities seen by a wider audience or do you want something achieved through the criminal justice process? For some, however, posting clips on social media is about education rather than shaming.

[00:08:34]Sha, better known as Big Jobber, is a former insurance claim handler. His videos explaining likely outcomes of road traffic incidents based on journey cam footage, have received nearly 60 million views on YouTube and over 17 million likes on Tik Tok. He believes sharing these videos has helped people to understand where they could be going wrong on the roads. As a claim handler, um, you see a high volume of road traffic collisions. You're assessing liability on a a daily basis. What you do see is that a lot of people misunderstand road rules quite a bit.

[00:09:08]Everybody probably thinks they're the best driver in the world, but actually um, if you were to be analyzed, you would probably find that your technical ability went down if you don't keep up to date with the the modern changes and modern practices and driving. The publication of videos on social media has has helped people understand where they could be going wrong. And I think the more awareness you bring, the more people can understand things about their own driving and and put corrective behaviors in place, which not everybody will do, but a lot of people are receptive to it. And I also get a lot of people writing into me saying that they've never thought about the things that I've said in a video. And they'll say they'll thank me for helping improve their driving. And naturally the the subject matter is very divisive and the comment sections can be quite argumentative but um a lot of people do find it worthwhile. Some people really don't like the information that are put out there and they can be quite bitter towards it but ultimately a lot of people do learn from it.

[00:10:08]>> So whether by reporting to the authorities or posting on social media should it be up to us to police our roads? In 2024 Dr. Helen Wells worked on a research project investigating the impact of public reporting on traffic safety. She says this may help to act as a deterrent for dangerous, illegal or careless driving. I think it's really hard to measure the effectiveness.

[00:10:30]There's a lot of um criminological and sociological research and perhaps psychological research that shows that actually we would expect the increasing amounts of surveillance on the roads to have what we might call a chilling effect on people's behavior. If you just think about perhaps the vehicle behind you or the vehicle coming towards you from the other direction or the cyclist you're trying to pass or the pedestrian that's maybe trying to cross the road.

[00:10:52]If you imagine them as somebody who perhaps has on them with them that that means to hold you accountable that you're not going to just get away with it. If you just have that in the back of your mind, maybe people won't do some of the things that um that we see captured in in footage every day. There does seem to be a desire from some members of the public to help police our roads.

[00:11:11]Nationally, Operation SNAP and similar schemes received more than 100,000 submissions last year. Although groups like the AA point out that filming and posting these types of clips doesn't hold all the answers to keeping our roads safe. Nonetheless, police forces, academics, and people like Mikey all agree that the public can help to deter dangerous driving.