If you’ve ever been cycling in Toronto, and had a car scream past you a hairsbreadth away, you’ve probably thought to yourself, “what do I have to wear to make them see me?”

A fluorescent vest? A giant hat? A full police uniform?

Well, the latter didn’t help Toronto police Const. Marc Hayford on Monday, when he ended up getting side-swiped by an SUV while on his police bicycle. Now he wants Torontonians to know the importance of reporting these collisions — and he’s offering to help personally if anyone feels lost.

After he tweeted about his experience, other frustrated Toronto cyclists began to respond. Hayford told people to message him directly if they needed help with the process of reporting.

“It’s been a frustration in the city for a long time,” said Hayford, who has spent a fair chunk of his 18 years as an officer on the saddle of a bicycle. “Cyclists and drivers are at odds with each other, right? Everyone thinks they’re right and the others’ wrong ... and both sides need to take responsibility (for how they conduct themselves on the road).”

Hayford was jabbed in the left side with a car mirror when a vehicle attempted a right turn at an intersection and almost pushed him over; he had to bang on the SUV to get the driver to stop. It was his first time getting hit by a car while on his bicycle, and although he’s relatively unhurt, he knows how serious it could have been.

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“If it had been somebody else (who was) a little bit more fatigued or not as competent on a bicycle, we could have been looking at a fatality in broad daylight.”

It’s not always a matter of visibility. How would that driver see the average citizen, he said, “if (they) don’t see a 200-pound officer with ‘POLICE’ written in giant letters on the back of the vest, in broad daylight?”

As an officer, Hayford had the ability to charge the man who side-swiped him on the spot, which isn’t something civilians can do. He charged the man with careless driving. A Twitter user pointed out that the average cyclist is often told to head to the collision reporting centre in Scarborough, a facility that can be very out of the way, especially for a cyclist who might have a damaged bicycle.

“That’s not ideal to have cyclists ride all the way up to (the Scarborough CRC),” Hayford acknowledged. People are hesitant to remain on scene, too. “I hear a lot of stories about this happening, and people are like, ‘Well, I didn’t bother to call, because I didn’t think anybody would come.’ ”

Although police are “super busy,” he said, if you call them at 911 or at their non-emergency line (416-808-2222), an officer will be sent to the scene. Ideally, driver and cyclist remain at the scene to talk to police and each other. But since not everyone can stay by the side of the road to wait — one man told the Star that it took over two hours for an officer to respond — Hayford said you can leave your information and police “can always have an officer come out your house later on that day and take a report as to what happened.”

He said citizens can also ask the officer who takes their initial report for something called an “occurrence number,” which is a unique code generated for each new case. Using this, a civilian can call police and get them to search that number directly in order to find out if there’s been any updates to the case.

Hayford said one of the other reasons people don’t report is because they feel like no charges will be laid anyway.

The main barrier to getting the appropriate charges laid, he said, is being able to identify the driver of the vehicle. Even if police have a licence plate number, “if we can’t identify the driver (operating the vehicle at the time of collision) it makes it difficult for us to lay a charge. Maybe at times, we as an organization don’t explain that well enough.”

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This makes things like video footage from cyclists invaluable to an investigation, he said. But, he says, that doesn’t mean there’s no point in reporting an incident if a cyclist doesn’t have a good description of the driver.

“Say there’s a street where several dooring incidents have happened,” Hayford said, referring to collisions where a car door is opened into the path of a cyclist biking next to the vehicle. “If we don’t have the stats for that, then it makes it difficult for a (city) counsellor or anybody to say, hey, we need bike lanes on this street, because we’re having a ton of issues with it.”

O’Connor Dr., where Hayford was struck, has no bike lanes.

“The frustrating part for us is I hear a lot about it after the fact, like, ‘Oh yeah, this driver hit me,’ a lot of people have all these stories,” he said, referencing the response he got on Twitter, “but I don’t hear a lot of the calls coming across (the police radio) for cyclists hit or cyclists doored — but I know it’s happening.”