Giving the whole walking tractor thing more thought.
Commercial lawn mowers went through a phase when they were walk behinds. Then someone got smarter and decided that a tow behind sulky would mean less work. Then someone else saw the shortcomings of sulkies and came up with the stand on mower.
Watching one video demonstrating a walk behind tractor equipped with a rotary brush cutter, it seems to me that the operator was doing a lot of work simply turning the tractor and trying to keep up with it. It looks like a familiar scene to me of having to nibble away at brush by repeatedly driving into it, backing out, going forward, and then having to reposition the tractor by turning it to cut the brush from a different angle. This amounts to a lot of steps just to cut a relatively small area.
Also, the tractor's forward speed doesn't always equate to a comfortable walking speed for the operator when on a hillside and the terrain varies, especially when the tractor has to be turned on a hillside in order to be repositioned.
I understand that these things are built to plow while also doing mowing work. I understand that a sulky isn't going to work well on a hillside, but I also think that brush mowers could be designed to allow for a platform for either walking or stand on operation. Being able to stand on the machine would take a significant amount of work out of this.
