Breakdown Cover company Green Flag, in association with University College London have come up with a most unusual set of statistics and can now tell us that being stuck behind a tractor on rural roads isn’t as bad as we all think!
There are around 250,000 tractors in the UK and the research has shown that if you drive on part of the UK’s 132,352 miles of minor rural roads for just 80 minutes, you are, at some point, going to get stuck behind a tractor. The upside is that it’s only likely to be for between 1.2 and 3.1 miles and will only add between one to two percent to your journey time.
This isn’t just gut feeling, as the study, which focused on the spring summer period of March to September even devised an equation to prove it, which apparently says during the period they studied that drivers will be held up for between two and four minutes for every hour they drive.
So, this study proves what we already know and that’s that during the months when tractors are most active on our roads, we are going to get held up (as if we didn’t know that) but its not going to be for long, so we should just be patient.
They say that we mustn’t make any risky manoeuvres by trying to overtake, particularly on narrow roads as they tend to be bendy, have foliage obscuring your view and “can be fraught with danger”
So the message is you won’t be delayed for long, just accept it, and don’t get frustrated!
I have reported on some rather strange research from very authoritative sources over the years, but this has to be one of the strangest and I wonder if they might do some research into the myth that it gets dark earlier in the evening in the winter months, because I for one just cant wait to read it.
