It’s a little after noon on Monday and Wayne Edward is driving westbound on Hwy. 401, approaching Hwy. 427.

Suddenly, a cyclist heading against traffic swings off the right shoulder and cuts diagonally across four lanes of highway, performing a U-turn before hopping off his bike by the opposite guard rail.

Edward captured the whole unsettling scene on video with the dashboard camera in his flatbed tow truck.

“I saw the black car (beside me) was braking... so I did a quick mirror check to see if I could change lanes to give the black car room to move over,” said Edward.

“When I looked back that’s when I saw the guy darting across the highway.”

A fellow truck driver has seen the cyclist cross the highway before and believes he is trying to get to his workplace in the area, he added.





“The cyclist could be charged with (being a) pedestrian or cyclist on the highway and taken off the highway,” said Sgt. Kerry Schmidt of the OPP’s Highway Safety Division.

“It’s just unbelievably dangerous ... He’s probably going to die before he gets charged.”

Schmidt was not aware of any calls made to the OPP regarding the incident.

Edward has driven a tow truck for Avis car rental since 2003. It’s a job that takes him all over Ontario and the eastern United States, and exposes him to more than his share of strange and illegal behaviour on roads and highways.

Eventually he mounted a camera on his dash to record some of the action.

“I just put it there because I’ve seen so many things and I thought it would be cool to catch them on video,” he said. “And I’ve got one in my personal vehicle too.”

Over the past eight years, Edward has posted nearly 80 traffic videos to his Youtube account.

In one, from 2009, a senior citizen in a motorized scooter “jaywalks” across Bathurst St. near Steeles Ave. W., forcing drivers to slam on their brakes.

A video from November 2016 shows an SUV driving in the wrong lane, heading into oncoming traffic.

A TTC streetcar running a red light, a speeding car spinning out on a snowy Hwy. 420, and all manner of vehicles dangerously passing, merging or tailgating a wide variety of vehicles tailgating or passing each other far too fast, round out Edward’s collection of videos.

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The most memorable, Edward said, is a video from 2013, in which a transport trailer rear-ends a road salt truck on Hwy. 401 southwest of London, Ont.

The collision footage is one of a handful of videos Edward has turned over to police.

Schmidt said dash cam video submitted by the public have become a valuable resource for OPP highway officers.

“We’re getting more and more of them all the time and they are so helpful and beneficial for us,” he said. “It just gives us that objective look as to what we’re (investigating) on the roads, instead of someone’s witness statement.”