Louis Roesch, Director of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture and farmer in Chatham-Kent, wants to share best practices for farmers operating slow moving vehicles.
He also offers valuable advice for motorists who encounter farm equipment on the road. These tips are useful across the country.
“Farm equipment is bigger than it used to be and moves much slower than regular road traffic – no more than about 40 km an hour,” says Roesch on the OFA website. “Because of the size and comparably slow speed of farm equipment, collisions with slow moving vehicles are 5.5 times higher and result in 3.8 times more fatalities than collisions between two cars, per kilometre on the road.”
Most accidents are rear-ending collisions and passing errors, followed by head-on collisions, swerving, side-on impacts, and turning into oncoming traffic. It may surprize people to learn that almost 80 percent of collisions with slow moving vehicles happen during the day under good visibility and dry road conditions.