Farmers, motorists urged to share the road this spring

By Louis Roesch, Director, Ontario Federation of Agriculture

Ontarians across the province are eagerly anticipating the upcoming Victoria Day long weekend which has long unofficially marked the start of a year’s camping, cottaging and summer travel season.

With the weather slowly warming up, farmers are also getting busy working their fields and planting this year’s crops. That means you’ll see more large tractors and farm equipment on the roads as farmers travel from field to field and farm to farm while they work.

Both of these milestones mean more people, vehicles and equipment will be sharing Ontario’s busy roads – and all of us must share those roads responsibly to make sure everyone gets to where they are going and home again safely.

Many drivers get frustrated when they get stuck behind a slow-moving tractor, especially if they’re in a rush. But farmers can’t always pull over; on busy urban roads, there may not be enough space to move aside safely. The same is true on rural roads, where the shoulders are often steep and narrow – and at this time of year, they can still be soft as the ground is still drying out from the spring thaw.

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.

It’s estimated that approximately 8.5 million vehicles drive about 136 billion kilometres in Ontario each year. Annually, there are about 200,000 accidents, 50,000 with injury and over 500 fatalities

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 are rear-ending collisions and passing errors, followed by head-on collisions, swerving, side-on impacts, and turning into oncoming traffic. Almost 80 per cent of collisions with slow moving vehicles happen during the day under good visibility and dry road conditions.

I farm in Chatham-Kent in southwestern Ontario and I’m also a director on the board of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture. We work on many issues that affect farmers and rural communities. Road safety is a big focus, as is advocating for better roads and transportation infrastructure and regulations that reflect the needs of our modern agriculture industry – one of the biggest pillars of the provincial economy.