You can’t have been cycling for long if you haven’t had a near miss.

Whether it’s a car door flung open feet in front of you, or a van cutting you up at a junction, sooner or later the beginnings of a potentially lethal crash will unfold before your eyes.

Adrenalin kicks in and nearly always, you can brake or swerve in time to avert a serious collision.

Sometimes you can’t stop quickly enough and you do crash.

I’ve been lucky and always crashed at low speed, I guess because I’ve drastically reduced my momentum through frantic braking.

There was the time I went over a car bonnet at The Plain.

The driver made an illegal left turn from Cowley Road into Iffley Road and drove straight across my path as I started onto the roundabout.

This was a classic “SMIDSY” – Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You – although the shocked middle-aged driver missed out the “Mate” when she blurted: “I am so sorry, I just didn’t see you.”

This failure of drivers to see people on bikes – and on motorcycles for that matter – is staggeringly common. And it’s not only drivers.

I had another head-over-heels crash a few hundred metres away, at the junction of Rose Lane and High Street. Someone on a bike rode out into the road at the exact moment I was passing.

Somehow, despite allegedly looking, she managed not to see me in broad daylight. We were both hurt, a little.

Neither crash was reported to the police and so they never made it into the county council’s little black book.

My bad, especially as I know that these entries in the little black book are the trigger the council uses to implement their reactive road safety measures.

Too few serious collisions at a given location mean you don’t get any calming measures.

Almost exclusively, near misses are unintentional, I’d like to think. Intentional near misses do happen and they seem more common in the countryside. Most road cyclists have experienced either abuse or dangerous driving at some point.

Once on a ride from Oxford out to Brill we were jeered at and driven at by a carload of spotty teenagers. They had a real hoot but another six inches and we could have lost our lives.

Ten minutes later, we parked our bikes in the beer garden of The Pheasant and walked in to seek refreshment. Lo and behold, who was propping up the bar? The glove was on the other hand that day, but redress is rarely available after a driver threatens your life.

If near misses are an unwelcome feature of your life, then get along to a free talk this evening by Dr Rachel Aldred, an academic behind the Near Miss Project.

It’s one of the monthly Cyclox events at St Michael in the Northgate (Cornmarket Street) at 7.30pm today.

Near miss and related incidents are common, according to a study in Oxford in the early 1990s.

Other studies suggest close passes (under 50cm) happen with predictable regularity for commuting cyclists.

But Dr Aldred, a senior lecturer in transport at the University of Westminster, says that until the Near Miss Project there had been little proper research into non-injury incidents.

The Near Miss Project researches, analyses and documents cycling near misses.

Through the project, the cycling public can discuss experiences of near misses and related incidents, the effect that these have had, and their views about preventing such incidents. The aim is also to contribute to the training of drivers and transport professionals.

To get the low down on this important topic, don’t near miss Dr Aldred’s talk tonight.