Was this trucker in the wrong?

Was this trucker in the wrong?

https://vid.me/VAy1

Dashcam footage, at night (very early morning) and cam quality is bad, but can make out the gist of it from video: (at 1:15 into 2:00 minute clip)

On stretch of highway with speed limit about 70. Truck going 60 or 65 on the left most /passing lane.

At 1:14 you see the car ahead (who was directly behind the truck) deciding the pass the slow moving truck by shifting to the center lane and then immediately moving back to the left lane.

At 1:23 I finally realize he is going to slow and I will catch up and run into him so I signal intent to move to center lane in order to pass him. There are no other cars in our immediate vicinity whether behind me, in the center lane or in any of the other lanes.

At 1:25 the white truck ahead starts to signal intent to turn/shift/ but goes straight for a few seconds and pauses and doesn't actually do anything, leading me to believe he may have wanted me to pass him first or something...

At 1:28 truck actually starts to shift into the center lane.

At 1:31 truck is almost entirely in center lane and most entirely cleared the left most lane.

Then just as I'm about to pass him, will starting to go parallel alongside him, he does an about face and comes back into the right lane, forcing me off the road and into the shoulder. It took him several seconds to hesitantly move from left lane to center lane, yet he moves back with much faster speed with no signaling. I know he saw me because I even put my headlight's highbeams on and honked several times when I realized what he was doing.

If I had reacted slower and he had bumped into me under these conditions who would have been at fault?

Note objects in real life were closer than they appeared in the camera... Also note that on his way back into the left lane he didn't signal at all, and infact he was still signaling to move to the center lane through the entire time!


I think he was just pissed off that other cars were (rightfully) passing him and wanted to get back at someone by bullying them off the road.

What could I have done differently to avoid him running me off the road like that?

 

At 1:28 in the 2:00 minute clip you don't see the white truck directly ahead in the left lane moving to the center?

 

Okay thanks for the reply. He was basically grandpa-ing his way into the center lane, as noted after he signaled intent to shift to center lane, he does nothing for several seconds and then slowly inches to the center lane. I hadn't 'bright lighted' anyone at that point and was actually keeping distance (didn't close him with high delta velocity or tailgate him or anything), it appeared to me in retrospect he seemed intent on trapping me either way. He just didn't want me to pass him at all, plain and simple. Who knows how many other cars passed him that night? We know from the video at least two cars did the same, so perhaps I was the straw that broke his camel's back. I was going planning on going to shift to the center lane to "pass" him, so that he wouldn't need to move. He never gave me the chance to do so, he starting signalling like he wanted the spot - like he reserved it all for himself, but didn't move. After waiting a reasonable amount on time for him to make a move, and thinking perhaps he had changed his mind, and whether coincidence or not, it wasn't until I started moving to the center that he starting moving too, so then I moved back to the left to pass him since obviously it was apparent he would soon be in the center lane. His vehicle almost entirely went into the center lane and I was going parallel to him at that point when he decided (because I had bright lighted him) that out of spite he was going to run me off the road like that.

In retrospect it appeared to me that he was probably going under speed limit and staying in the passing lane all night, and got tired of other vehicles passing him just to immediately get back in front of him in the left lane. (the car ahead of me did just that!) When he saw me coming, he probably decided then and there that enough was enough and he was going to use his larger vehicle to bully smaller ones and put a stop to this. He figured I was going to passing him by maneuvering into the center lane, (since I signaled, plus it was obvious anyway), so he signaled too, causing me to understandably hesitate to see what he was going to do. Then he probably intentionally didn't want to budge at all, in effect purposefully sitting on the toilet without taking a cr*p in order to deny others the ability to use said toilet, then when he finally saw that I made a move, he decided he was going to move to block me, at this point I had a reasonable basis to increase the lighting on my compact vehicle in order to gain better situational awareness and maximize visibility and to warn him in case he was drunk/sleepy/ etc (all his actions up to this point seemed deliberately or unusually slow, lagging or conservative, etc) but he immediately retaliated by recklessly swinging back into the left lane (even though he was almost entirely in the center lane at this point) in a manner inconsistent with his earlier actions and without signalling and without yielding to any right of way. There was no way he didn't see me especially with the lights and honking, yet he managed to place his truck back in the left lane at the expense of running me off the highway and into the shoulder.

I've had this happened to me in the past (not a truck, just a regular car) where it almost seemed like the car ahead was intentionally trying to engineer an accident while legally pinning it on me. A while back, on a different highway, there was a sedan in front of me, we were both in the left lane of a three lane highway. No one was going very fast because there was a lot of congestion and this was during traffic hour. Cars were naturally swerving in and out, changing lanes and that sort of stuff. For whatever reason, the car ahead of me seemed intent on purposefully manufacturing an accident in which I would rear end him. He would swerve to the right, into the center lane, leaving a gap where his car used to be, then when I attempted to bridge the gap by moving forward he immediately (and much more aggressively than the truck in this video) decided to snap back into the left lane, literally had I not taken decisive action I would have been hard struck by him, this was also a construction zone and I ended up not only on the shoulder but unavoidably impacted with a large orange cone that ended up doing some damage to my undercarriage. When he swerved back the way he did, I had to immediately stepped on the brakes as hard as I could, but worried the car behind me would strike me, yet even that only barely put me bumper to bumper behind him (had I not slowed down at all his car would have likely struck mine side by side) and I couldn't believe it but simultaneously he was stomping on his brakes while in the left lane though he didn't need to do so because there was plenty of clearance in terms of the car ahead of him on the left lane, the center lane was a wall of cars so my only remaining option not to strike him in the back bumper was to swerve into the left shoulder. In effect, he boxed me in and then slammed on the brakes in hopes that I would either strike him in the back (and have it still be my fault) or force me off the road and onto the shoulder, striking a construction cone along the way.

It was that incident that prompted me to get a car camera in the first place. I should get a better resolution on that captures license plates. I reported it to the police and they didn't even care. Are there any compact automatic license plate scanners for civilian use?