As we chat, Mike van Erp keeps glancing at the line of vehicles queueing on the road in Hyde Park, London. Suddenly, he spots something. “Here we go,” he says, swinging around his sensible-looking blue touring bike, and pedalling away from the traffic lights. He edges along the stationary vehicles until he is parallel to a car. It is well over a minute before the driver looks up and spots him – and the camera strapped to his baseball cap.

When he returns, a grinning Van Erp tells me the man reacted badly to the realisation he was being caught on camera. Why the fury? The driver was using his phone as he waited for the traffic to move – and Van Erp recorded him doing it. In the coming months the man will most likely face a fine and six points on his driving licence, in turn triggering a significant jump in his insurance premium.

Van Erp, a 49-year-old professional carer, says he has now reported close to 1,000 law-breaking drivers to the police, with about 80% facing prosecution. After any court proceedings are finished, he posts the footage on his YouTube channel. There have been some famous faces among the drivers he has reported. In early December, Van Erp allegedly filmed Frank Lampard using a phone while driving – the former footballer has denied the offence. Footage shot by Van Erp, however, has resulted in court action against ex-boxer Chris Eubank and Guy Ritchie, with the film director banned from driving.

All of this has led to headlines, occasional TV appearances and made him the semi-reluctant public face of a new era of road crime enforcement, one in which police forces are being encouraged to accept online complaints about offences, backed up by video footage. Many of the complaints come from cyclists, who view such footage as one of the few ways they can push back against endemic levels of dangerous driving.

It can be a controversial area. Van Erp regularly features in news articles as a “vigilante cyclist”, a description he dislikes intensely and which he has, on occasion, managed to have altered after complaining.

Van Erp’s 65,000 subscribers to his CyclingMikey YouTube channel have been enough to earn him a modest extra income as a result of his actions. Yet, he says, far from selecting prominent targets, he did not recognise any of the celebrities when he approached them. (The footage of him challenging Eubank for holding a phone at the wheel of his convertible Rolls- Royce sees him ask the clearly unimpressed former world champion, “Are you famous?”). And, he insists, a media profile was never his aim. His motivation is much simpler: trying to make the roads safer, one driver at a time.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/05/filming-cyclingmikey-dangerous-drivers-mike-van-erp-motorists-britain-roads-safer

The underlined word in “. (The footage of him challenging Eubank for holding a phone at the wheel of his convertible Rolls-Royce sees him ask the clearly unimpressed former world champion, “Are you famous?”).” could be replaced, with the same meaning, by