If it had happened to me the van driver would have lost the ability to breathe through his nose for some considerable time - and after I'd scraped out the inside of my leathers and deposited the contents in his cab, the desire to inhale at all for a while.
I would think a sound case could be made for attempted murder. It's not important that the weapon of choice was a van or car, only that a reasonable outcome of the assault is serious injury or death.
If you accidently kill someone, e.g. through being incompetent through drink or driving too fast to be able to stop, you quite rightly receive sanctions that are intended to deter you (and others) from acting in the same way, or you are prevented from doing it again (e.g. by a lost license.)
If, instead, you deliberately set out to cause that death or injury, there is no value in deterrence and the only real solution is to prevent or restrain the murderer. In any event, intent would have to be proven and reports would be sought as to why you did what you did, but at the end of the day...
I mean, running someone off the road is not really any different to cutting through their brake pipes or whatever, which I doubt anyone would regard as a misdemeanour.
All bad behaviour, realistically.
Agreed, if you are riding a bike (or driving a car) and someone is trying to make you crash, it's not really feasible to obey the highway code.
All this sort of thing is bad and creates danger, particularly for non-drivers who happen to get involved.
For my part, I used to ride a bike and very quickly decided that I wouldn't believe a car indicating meant it was going to move off my road until I saw the wheels turn. Same logic, it was far more sensible to ride on the assumption that any car would be unaware that I was there. Made for excessive caution to some extent, but it did mean the game was safe unless I made a mistake, not letting someone else make a mistake and me getting the injuries, which is kind of how bike accidents tend to work out.
Also, when a car did something stupid, I felt smart for being prepared for exactly that. Simple things, like when a car has someone in it, they might open the door just as I am overtaking, so move out to clear the doors.
Not been a fan of road rage.
Bizarrely, I did once become a victim of it. I was driving a bit of a hairdresser car, some japanese 1.6 I forget what, and I had quite long hair at the time. Going along a country lane with passing spaces, I was taking it steady, well, like one does, and after a while, a BMW caught up and once it did, it got right on my bumper and started flashing and beeping, especially as having a BMW on the bumper is a reason for me to slow down a bit rather than end up as the jam in a sandwich.
After a few seconds, maybe a minute of blaring and flashing, I thought "that's enough of this" and the next passing space, pulled over to the left. The idea was they can go ahead and clear the way, I can speed up quite a bit if I know I have something to take the oncoming traffic on the nose instead of me.
But the BMW stops behind me, and out gets a middle aged woman, well, about thirties or forties, stocky build, and walks up towards my car with red face. Weird, I thought, and climbed out myself. Interestingly enough, seeing a rather tall and broad man with long hair emerge from the little car, she went white and scurried back to her car and sat there for a bit. So I got back in and drove off, didn't see the car again.
Quite amusing in a way, but I dunno what would have happened if she'd attacked me, I mean, what do you do eh? ;)
Run!!
Only other road rage incidents have been as follows
Cars turning into side roads while I am walking across - they have a go I remind them of highway code.
Or two others different occasions similar place.
Following a queue of traffic with the caravan on the back, an Escrap struggles past and gets abusive because they have trouble getting past and getting in front of me - I beat them at the next roundabout as they were too busy being prats rather than following signs - their heads nearly exploded at getting beat by a caravan on a roundabout.
Next time a van pulled out and I had to emergency stop very hard!
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