Three years ago, I spent a few days in Hungary, a country that’s physically about the size of Indiana and has a population about the size of Michigan’s. Hungary is relatively poor, and has one of the most right-wing, tight fisted governments in Europe.
But all the time I was there, I didn’t see a single pothole. When I asked, Hungarians didn’t seem to understand the question. If the roads needed fixing, of course they fixed the roads, they said. You couldn’t have a civilized country without decent roads.
Well, I suspect that the man who told me that hadn’t been to Michigan. Our roads are an utter disgrace. There are a number of reasons for that, including our harsh freeze-and-thaw climate. But beyond that, we just don’t spend enough to keep them up.
Ohio’s roads are significantly better than ours, in large part because Ohio spends $60 more per person on them every year. The money we do spend for roads gets divided between MDOT, the Michigan Department of Transportation, county road commissions and cities and villages, but not based on need. Instead, as CapCon writer Tom Gantert recently noted, it is divided based on a 1951 law, which was a compromise between city and country interests.
MDOT and the county road commissions each get 39 percent; cities and villages get 22 percent. That means it is impossible to target the roads in greatest need of repair, because you’d have to increase funding for the other areas as well, regardless of whether they need it or not. This is terribly inefficient and to tie our infrastructure needs to a formula enacted nearly seventy years ago is a form of insanity, whatever your politics.
Essentially, we also have a legislature that seems uninterested in doing things for the greater good of the people of Michigan, in part because of blind opposition to raise taxes.
Well, we are paying huge taxes anyway for not fixing them – our bad roads cost the average motorist hundreds of dollars a year in wear and tear on her or his car.
Hundreds of dollars more, that is, than we would be paying for even the steepest new tax to fix the damn roads. Many of us, including me, have lost tires or wheels or even axles.
And still they aren’t fixed. Like teeth with cavities, the longer we neglect them, the worse things become, and the higher the bill goes. Candice Miller, the shrewd Macomb County Public Works Commissioner, said back in March that the legislature’s latest effort to throw another $175 million at the problem was “just a drop in the pothole.”
She and Mark Hackel, her county executive and a Democrat, then wrote a letter saying that “an imminent danger to life and property exists in Macomb and much of Southeast Michigan due to the condition of the roads.”
They are not people given to exaggeration. This is especially a disgrace, given that this is the state that put the world on wheels, a state that has essentially no mass transit other than buses. Michigan has a very clear choice: Fix the roads, no matter what it costs.
Or just accept that our economy and our lives will just get worse and worse. Really – is it any wonder that Amazon didn’t even think about choosing Detroit for its mammoth new headquarters? If we want a future, it is simple as this: Just fix the damn roads.
