How To Merge Features in the Dataset Forest Cover Type Classification Problem? The forest coverType Dataset Contains the following attributes distributed in many boolean features.

Wilderness_Area (4 binary columns) / qualitative / 0 (absence) or 1 (presence) / Wilderness area designation
Soil_Type (40 binary columns) / qualitative / 0 (absence) or 1 (presence) / Soil Type designation 


Training the SVC classifier with RBF kernel without attributes re-engineering takes too much time. Can we merge all 40 binary columns for form a Soil_Type Attribute representing those columns. What are the pros and cons of this approach ? 

Also, do we have any direct approach to achieve this in weka or sklearn ?
On Some Analysis I found out the columns were mutually Exclusive and therefore created one column named Soil_Type(0..40 possible values) replacing 40 binary columns and Wilderness_Area(0..4 possible values) replacing 4 binary columns. This did improve performance of the classifiers (Random Forest, Decision Tree ) with respect to time and prediction accuracy as well.