Gentlemen.....and Leonz..... I have this tendency to see things as they really are. Reality is my reality. "What could be" is something little kids and poets dwell on. (I'm 63 years old, and you don't see much of this post rhyming....) As of this moment, I haven't bid any mowing jobs for the State of Utopia. In the world of commercial mowing, the reality is, low bidder gets the work. #2 bidder might as well be #5000. It's like NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt used to say, "2nd place is just the first loser".
Much is made of the saftey issue. Do you know what the most common cause of injuries while mowing highway ROW's is? It's vehicles colliding with tractors/trucks/employees. (To the tune of roughly 75:1 ratio compared with flying debris. ) While flying debris gets ALL the attention, there's still a VERY low incidence of that happening relative to the number of mowing rigs in service across the country. In 3-1/2 years since my firm has been mowing highway ROW's, we have yet to have the first incidence of a motorist being hit. (While we HAVE had 3 tractors hit by cars while the tractors were mowing IN THE FLIPPIN' MEDIAN) The number of collisions is relative to the amount of hours spent "in the line of fire". Use flails....Mowing time expands 2 to 4 times what would be expected while using rotaries. (Smaller mowers/slower ground speeds) Hence, more time in "the line of fire". And that's not counting the hours spent parked along side the roadways repairing damage to flail mowers vs rotaries. Flails typically require more mowers operating at much lower ground speeds. So the saftey issue ends up being a virtual wash.... Those of us who've actually done this sort of work with BOTH types of mowers realize this part of the equasion. The industrial engineers who write bid specs for county/state/federal highway mowing contracts realize this too... There is your reason why they don't specify EITHER type of mower....Injuries per mile of highway mowed show NEITHER has an advantage when all is said and done. Use rotary mowers and we're off the roadway faster, hence less likelyhood of accident. MORE chance of actually making a buck for my troubles. There is MY "reality".
The cold hard reality is, the ONLY true safe way to mow highway ROW's would be to close the roads to vehicular traffic while they were being mowed. Any idea of how likely THAT is to happen?
So here we are, back to the point where several proponents of flail mowers seem to be PURPOSELY misrepresenting the FACTS (or at the very least, IGNORING FACTS) in order to promote their own agenda.
Ignoring reality, even if only for the purpose of debate, is still not reality.
For anyone who is offended by my tendency to call a spade a spade, sorry, but that's just the way it is. You probably won't need to go far to find people on TBN who've noticed I don't/won't sugar coat things.
Oh yeah.....I ALMOST have all the Caffine Free Diet Pepsi washed off my monitor after I read Leonz little snippet about rotaries promoting the rat population. That there is funny stuff, I don't care who you are!!!
