Safe Speed Forums

Living in a rural area, it is frequently brought to my attention how irresponsible people in the agriculture industry are over dropping mud and other detritus on the road. When is the last time you saw a tractor being cleaned before venturing on the public highway or saw a road being brushed clean of manure or mud from fields? Mud dropped by lorries from building sites is sometimes dealt with by a sweeper lorry.
You are lucky even to get a "mud on road" sign these days.
Use of ever wider and larger trailers drwan by "road" tractors at 40 mph doesn't help as the drivers don't bother to slow down when they meet another vehicle on a narrow road - they just drive along the verge without reducing speed, splattering mud all over the road. And then there's the hedge cuttings from tractor-mounted flails, thorns and all, dropped all over the road.
I believe that if one reports a muddy road to the police then they have to do something about it, assuming they can find the culprits.
Rant over....

grrrrrrr

I work on a 1600 acre commercial arable farm. There are 3 of us to do the field work. Why are there 3 of us to do the field work??? Because you want feeding for nothing. I spend most days looking at the value of the produce we produce and looking at what we get for it and wonder to my self just how he is finding the money to pay me. Building contractors pass the road sweeping charge onto some one else, my boss can't.

We don't like working our fields when they are wet because they become compacted. It is hard enough to pay the bills will good soil never mind compact soil. But some times you just have to run. We don't like putting mud on the road. I won't take my car to work because it gets dirty and we have a very clean yard that gets swept.

Now, we have a road sweeper that gets on the front of the loader and sweeps the mud into the bucket. But you try sweeping roads. It's bad enough using the roads at 20 mph on a tractor, nevermind trying to sweep them at 1 mph. People hoot their horns at you, get in your way and general are a pain in the arse when all you are trying to do is clean up after yourself.

The same with hedge cutting. If you try driving a car at 100 mph in fog, you will use half the concerntration that you will do hedge cutting on the side of a road. Anyway I've been driving for 15 years and have NEVER had a puncture, so what the problem with thorns???

And it's hardly breaking news that in the countryside you get mud on the road when it's wet. I assume you are one of these people that moved to the country with rose tinted views of what it should be like and then complains when it fails to meet your expectaions. I can see the headlines now "Tractor In Using Country Road SHOCKER!".

I see people having heart failure every time I take a tractor on the road. Why have you driven past that suitable pull in when you must have surely seen the big red noisy tractor with an amber flashing beacon? Why then do you expect me go on a soft verge (I can get you out of the ditch, rekon you can get me out?), because the very idea of meeting an agricultural vehicle on a country road has left you paralised? Though my tractor has 24 reverse gears it is considersable longer, wider and more difficult to manover than your Nissan Micra, so is it out of the question to engage the one reverse gear that your car is fitted with and back up to that passing space you would have seen had you been driving with open eyes.

For the record, the tractor I drive is a y2k model, it's spotlessly clean, everything works, has a valid tax disc and those oil inmersed multidisc brakes are in fine fettle. If you dont like living in the country MOVE TO THE TOWN.

Rant, just warming up

Sorry but my wife and I (my wife is a nurse) have been on the scene of a motorcycle accident where the motorcyclist on a touring bike had hit a patch of mud on the apex of a bend and skidded off into a ditch. The mud was about an inch thick and followed tractor tread marks came out of a field and down the A-road towards another farm. This and Diesel spills are the things I fear most when out on my bike.

On numerous occasions I have followed tractors spewing thick mud from the tyres and farm implemts onto smooth tarmac. It is lethal.

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Speed camera policy Kills

Well, I reckon its understandable to go off on one from time to time, especially when our livlihood or pastime is criticised. My father-in-law worked the land for 60-odd years mate, so I can empathise completely with your position.
But as a biker, I'm acutely aware of the hazards of countryside riding - nearly came a cropper on an enormous clump of dried mud that had caked itself to the road once
Trouble is, we all seem to be so impatient to get where we're going these days that any inconvenience seems so easy to blow out of all proportion.

How about some water dips on the exits of your field's

The farmer is required to operate in a legal manner, scimping on safe running cost's should not be an option.

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Steve

We have had this discussion before in another thread and I remember Adam telling us that he is very careful about bringing mud onto the road and does his utmost to ensure he doesn't.

Remember that motorists are not the only group of people that have bad apples I'm sure that there are a few farmers who don't give a toss about the roads, but I'm also sure that the majority do their best.

/rant supporter

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Ross

Yes I'm a hoon, but only on the track!!!!

The offence is covered under the Highways Act 1980, Sections 148 and 161, which deals with the depositing of all manner of debris on the carriageway.

It is usually dealt with by education, advising farm owners of the potential consequences, and the responsibity they have to ensure clear clean roads.

Like Ross says there are responsible and irresponsible farmers. The important thing to remember is the highway code mantra (or the safespeed derivation) that you must drive so that you can stop in the distance you can see to be clear. This will allow you to anticipate and deal with this kind of problem.
Even the best efforts to clean up mud on the road can often exacerbate the situation - water on the road when least expected, then mixed with farm debris to make a slimy film on the road which I'd expect could be even worse than highly visible thick chunks of hard mud.

But I don't think that farmers and bikers will ever mix terribly well. Many single track country roads in our area have a lot of mud on them because they run through the middle of a farm complex. It'd be almost impossible to keep the road clean. Reasonably there are very few complaints if any about them. The problem is almost exclusively where the farms are on tracks used regularly by bikers. My experiences in our area is that the farmers are by and large responsible and if spoken to will try their best to resolve the problem.

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Fixed ideas are like cramp, for instance in the foot, yet the best remedy is to step on them.

Ian

This is the wonderful thing about how road safety works - everyone's responsible.

In this example, the farmer's responsible in the first place, yet drivers and riders are also responsible for thier own safety.

These tiers of responsibility, given and received, mean that one person's error is unlikely to cause a crash. Usually multiple people have to make overlapping mistakes. If it wasn't for this tiered structure of responsibilities, I believe we would have at least a one and maybe two orders of magnitude (i.e. x10 to x100) more crashes.

It also follows that small changes in responsibility might be expected to have surprisingly large impacts on crash rates.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I very nearly lost it on some wet mud on the road in my car - and I wasn't going fast either. As it was dark it wasn't easy to spot, and there weren't signs either.
Mud really can be as slippery as ice.

Cheers
Peter

It's one of the reasons why I have taken the pledge - there is not much you can do about mud or ice except to moderate your speed in case you hit some. There is a stretch with a bend near my place, where a tractor regularly leaves clods. The farmer himself has put up a bit of signage to warn about mud, but over the years, I have seen about 10 cars in the field near this site, some turned over. Some of them had hit a telegraph pole, snapped it at the base, so I dread to think how that turned out – the road was closed, anyway.

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I stole this .sig

Oh, for crying out aloud, BW.
Your 'pledge' isn't going to save you if you hit mud at a perfectly legal 60mph.
I was doing 30-40mph for the simple fact that I had just turned onto the road and was accelerating up to speed. I could have been doing 60, quite legally. And quite safely as well, if it wasn't for the mud

Just for once, can you please turn off your 'stuck record' mode and look at the issues, instead of being blinkered by your prejudices.

I doubt you'd have stopped at 60 mph, so perhaps you were lucky it happened when you were accelerating up to speed.



Perhaps the mud should get penalty points!



Well, since you said 'please', I'll think about if you turn off your 'hot and bothered' mode and acknowledge the reason we have a general speed limit.

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I stole this .sig

Ok. Serious question for you Basingwerk. What is the reason (or reasons) why we have a general speed limit?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

One reason is due to a shortcoming in the SafeSpeed rule that Pete317 has observed. It says that drivers must drive such that they can stop within the distance they know is clear. It is not possible to tell the distance is clear if a hazard is almost invisible, such as mud or ice, or if something backs out of an alley, or pulls across your lane when you are in thier blind spot etc. Therefore, you have to break the SafeSpeed rule before you start – don’t you?

Speed limits, on the other hand, provide a compromise between fair progress and low risk and work in conjuction with the SafeSpeed rule.

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I stole this .sig

There's a perfectly worthy discussion to be had about the Safe Speed rule, but this isn't the place - we're talking about speed limits.



They may or may not provide such a compromise, but that's no answer at all to the original question is it?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Copied off the Background page:

Always ensure that you can stop comfortably, on your own side of the road, within the distance that you know to be clear.

I've always thought there's an unwritten caveat covering what "know" means. I don't want to Clintonize the word, but you're taking it as an absolute and I don't think it's meant that way. If we take it to mean "reasonably expect" it takes into account potential hazards. For example, the presence of driveways means someone might reverse out of one of them, very cold weather could mean there's ice on the road, and there could be mud on a road with fields either side. If you interpret the Safe Speed rule to be:

Always ensure that you can stop comfortably, on your own side of the road, within the distance that you can reasonably expect to be clear.

...and you don't spontaneously slow down to take account of potential hazards (within reason) as well as actual hazards, then you're not driving within that rule. (I'm sure this was all in another thread a while back).


Look at it like this, if all drivers followed that rule all the time from the day they passed their tests, would we need limits at all? Probably not. But since not all drivers are going to follow the rule limits are worth having for those that don't, right? Well, up to a point anyway .

I think it's a mistake to view limits as a compromise between progress and low risk for the simple reason that limits are inherently poor at coping with constantly changing levels of risk. The level of risk isn't even necessarily the same for two drivers on the same bit of road at the same time, let alone different times of day, weather, traffic levels and so on. Even variable limits would do a poor job. It must be down to drivers to assess risk, though I'd agree that we need to be better at it than we are.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Well, yes it is. If the world of accident avoidance had to be condensed down, two good rules would be the SafeSpeed rule, and the speed limit rules. The speed limits provides something useful that the SafeSpeed rule does not provide - a global expectation of the absolute maximum limit allowed for all drivers.

They inform all road users of the absolute top limit for reasonable speed, that has been reached by compromise and by due process and is binding by law. They allow prosecution of those who breach the limit of reasonable speed (that we have all agreed to implicitly when we drive). As a side effect, they may very well give a vague indication about expected hazards, but they also have the purpose that dare not speak it's name - they set speed expectations. See the other rant today about the poor bloke with the insolent solicitor.

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I stole this .sig

Compromise? Due process? Oooo stop it.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

I know, motorists want plenty of compromise and due process after they have violated the rights of other roads users by speeding! Try a little before it comes to that, and you may postpone your one-way trip to heaven. You must have some idea of the effect that your speeding has on the impressionable minds of young drivers!

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I stole this .sig

My speeding? Hardly. While I do speed moderately and only when I'm sure it's safe, I'm quite confident I'm not corrupting any young minds. In the highly unlikely event they were at all influenced by my driving they'd be going slower and listening to decent music.

The point is that speed limits are not selected by some wondrous democratic process that we all have an input into. I do wish you'd drop this line about limits being something we all signed up to. We didn't sign up, we weren't consulted, we didn't agree. The limits were imposed, plain and simple. To start with they probably got it right a lot of the time, but more and more often now they're unrealistic, inconsistent and inappropriately enforced. Please stop making out that this is something we agreed to.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein