A cyclist was taken to hospital as a priority after his e-bike ploughed into the front of a 149 bus on Tottenham’s High Road, smashing the windscreen.
Emergency services were called to High Road at around half past four on Tuesday afternoon, 29 September, after reports of the crash. The Metropolitan Police later confirmed the rider’s injuries were not life-threatening or life-changing.
Footage circulating online appears to show the moment the rider moved out onto the carriageway as the 149 pulled forward in slow traffic. Within seconds he had struck the front of the bus, the windscreen shattering on impact, before he fell to the ground — and then appeared to get back up.
The collision closed one of Tottenham’s busiest stretches of road. High Road was shut in both directions between Ferndale Road and Seven Sisters Road while a police cordon was put in place around the scene.
South Tottenham station was closed for hours as a result of the cordon, and six bus routes — the 76, 243, 279, 149, 318 and 476 — were diverted away from the area. Drivers faced heavy delays through Tottenham and Stamford Hill.
The smash came a day after a separate serious crash on Tottenham High Road that left a man being rushed to a major trauma centre, shutting the same road in both directions.
What the footage shows
The clip, shared widely on social media, appears to capture the 149 held in traffic on High Road as the e-bike rider emerges from the nearside. The bus begins to move forward, and the rider — who appears to misjudge the gap — collides with the front of the vehicle.
The windscreen cracks and gives way on impact. The rider is knocked to the ground but appears to pick himself up almost immediately, as bystanders look on. London Streets has not independently verified the footage.
Neither the Metropolitan Police nor TfL has commented publicly on the footage itself. The Met’s statement so far has been limited to the rider’s condition and the response at the scene.
A busy corridor for buses and cyclists
High Road is one of north London’s great thoroughfares, carrying the 149 — one of the capital’s busiest bus routes, linking Edmonton Green with London Bridge — alongside a constant flow of cyclists, delivery riders and shoppers.
The stretch between Ferndale Road and Seven Sisters Road is lined with shops and takeaways, and the road is frequently busy in the late afternoon as school runs, commuters and market traffic converge. Bus drivers along the corridor are used to sharing tight road space with two-wheeled traffic, but the margin for error is small when vehicles are pulling away from stops in stop-start conditions.
E-bikes and the road-safety debate
Electric bikes have boomed in popularity across London in recent years, with food-delivery riders in particular racking up huge daily mileages on the capital’s streets. Their extra weight and acceleration compared with conventional cycles can make collisions more serious for everyone involved — and a windscreen, for all its laminated strength, is no match for a direct strike at road level.
Safety campaigners have long urged riders to treat bus movements with particular caution: a bus pulling away has large blind spots at the front nearside, and a cyclist filtering past at the wrong moment can disappear from the driver’s mirrors entirely.
The Highway Code’s hierarchy of road users places a clear responsibility on those in charge of larger vehicles to look out for the most vulnerable — but it also reminds cyclists to avoid passing large vehicles closely when they are moving off.
Police enquiries into the circumstances of Tuesday’s crash are continuing.
