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Comment by veltas | Hacker News Reader

I don't engage in road rage, but I do get properly irritated by farm vehicles that choose to drive their max speed 10mph straight through town in the middle of rush hour. I honestly think there should be regulations about when you're allowed to drive slow vehicles like this on most roads. There is probably an environmental impact just from causing this mass of cars to slow down.

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The farmers are working. They don‘t choose to do that, they have places to be and need their machines to get there. Do you honestly believe they‘re doing that for the lulz? What should they be doing?

I don't know about common city/village planning in the USA, but where I am from, farm machines can almost always go around the village using secondary and tertiary roads. They don't need to go through the center or use the ring road. In this situation using these primary roads during traffic and driving way under the speed limit isn't the best choice from a communal point of view. Besides, given the width of their machines, driving through heavy traffic is more unsafe than going by a back road.

Of course, using the back roads often also means taking the "long road", albeit just by a couple of kilometers. I understand the urge to take the shortest route, but I think people should think of others on the road too.

Especially farmers during harvest time work from sunrise to sunset because crops ripen when they do, not according to some nice schedule. Asking the farmes to take the long road when everyone else could is inappropriate. Especially since if you‘re on a slow vehicle, 5km of detour cost significant amounts of time as opposed to driving a car.

Why don't you take the long road to avoid the farmers, then? You can't control other people's behaviour, but you can make your own life easier.

I don't really fault the farmers individually but I wouldn't mind rules to stop them.

So you want to find rules to inconvenience the people working long hours, so you can save a couple of minutes. How about realizing that you just need to plan a few minutes more for your commute and chill out. You‘re sitting comfortably in your car, likely with aircon running.

It's not saving a couple of minutes, it's saving literally days of people's time if you add it all together.

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