Think Regional/Act Local

As the weather gets colder, you can already see the ads in the sport pages reminding deer hunters to get ready for the upcoming season. Did you know that hunters took fewer deer in 2010 than in 2009? The Michigan DNR sent out a survey to registered hunters and it showed that they killed some 418,000 deer during the past hunting season, a six percent decrease from 2009. Another interesting bit of information is that the survey also showed that hunters spent 9.6 million days in the field! WOW! Do the math on that one! Over 500,000 hunters were involved in this annual ritual.

What does this have to do with transportation you ask? Well, a lot actually. Those hunters only took 418,000 out of an estimated deer herd of 1.8 million deer. What happened to the rest of them? Well, I can tell you that 56,000 of them were involved in close encounters with vehicles. Now this number is down a little bit from previous years, but so is the number of total crashes in the state. In Southeast Michigan, deer crashes make up only about five percent of all the crashes. However, almost one out of every five traffic crashes in the state – that is 20 percent – involve a deer and a vehicle! How many of you knew that? I don’t know about you, but I think that is a huge number. These crashes resulted in 11 people losing their lives – eight of them while driving their motorcycles!

This percentage has held constant over the past number of years despite the efforts of the Michigan Deer Crash Coalition (MDCC), now in its 15th year of working to decrease vehicle-deer crashes. We need to do more from a safety and an economic perspective.

Deer crashes are costly. In Michigan, deer crashes cost us approximately $130 million per year. The average insurance claim is about $2,100 in damage, usually to the front end, often leaving the vehicle undriveable.

So please be careful, especially during this time of year. Encounters with deer happen most often at dawn or dusk. If a crash is inevitable, the coalition cautions drivers not to swerve out of a lane to avoid a deer. It's generally safer to hit the deer than run off the road or risk injuring another motorist.

More information regarding vehicle-deer crashes is available on SEMCOG’s Web site. Visit the SEMCOG Deer Crashes Web page at www.semcog.org/DeerCrashes.aspx.

Hunters, let’s see if you can be more productive this year with those 9.6 million days in the field!

Last week, the U.S. House and Senate each passed legislation to extend surface transportation programs through March 31, 2012, and aviation programs through January 31, 2012. President Obama signed the legislation into law shortly thereafter. What did this action accomplish? Well, several things, including:

• Keeping both the transportation and aviation programs going for the next several months.
• Keeping people working and important improvements going forward.
• Giving Congress additional time to discuss long-term strategy on both fronts while issues considered more pressing (i.e., Super Committee dealing with deficit ) move forward

What the action did not do is give them enough time to develop a long term, well thought out, and properly funded transportation or aviation program. There is still considerable disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate on both bills. The aviation program has been extended almost 20 times since the legislation sunset and they are no closer, in my opinion, to addressing and agreeing on the long-term concerns today than they were months/years ago.

On the transportation side, we have already seen both the House and the Senate threaten to develop dueling language indicating very little agreement on the size, shape, or weight of a new transportation bill, let alone what goes in it. Don’t try to convince me that this is all going to be done, agreed to dollars, and in place by March 2012. I will tell you right now – not going to happen! They may start down that path, but it will not be finished until much later in the year.

So, count on at least one more extension after this one and then the fun will really begin!

Federal DOT recently changed its mind on requiring some costly and burdensome new regulations it had previously announced that would have forced communities across the country to replace perfectly good local traffic signs within some very tight timeframes.

They now say communities will be able to replace traffic signs when they are worn out, rather than requiring the signs to be replaced by a specific deadline. The proposed changes will eliminate 46 deadlines mandated by the originally proposed regulations, though it will also keep in place other deadlines it considers critical to safety.

What a concept – transportation agencies can wait to replace signs until they are worn out or otherwise destroyed! With dollars on the decline and Congress fussing about yet another short-term fix to the long-term transportation funding issue, how could they even consider putting yet another mandate on local units of government and other transportation providers with no additional funding? Lots of manpower would also have been necessary to meet the deadlines given the depleted staffs of many cities, counties, and state DOTs.

Safety is important and no one doubts this. However, if safety is so important, why didn’t this demand come with the necessary funds to implement it?

I guess some things are more important than others!

Well, here we are again going into the Labor Day weekend, the traditional signal that summer is over. One way you can tell summer is over is that traffic picks up. During the summer, kids are out of school, and people go on vacation. The result – traffic is down and you have an easier commute on most days.

Well, a new report just came out that says you are having an easier commute on most days because we are driving less all the time – not just in the summer! So far, we have driven 15.5 billion fewer miles in the first half of this year, according to that newly released report. 

As a country, we drove 1.453 trillion miles through June 30 – down 1.1 percent over the first half of 2010. The last time Americans drove less in the first half of the year was in 2004, when we drove 1.451 trillion miles. June is the fourth straight month of traffic decline, with the number of miles traveled falling by 1.4 percent.

Travel in Michigan decreased more than the national average. Travel was down 1.6 percent in June to 8.6 billion miles. In May, travel on Michigan roadways fell 2.2 percent to 8.2 billion miles, according to preliminary state figures.

Why? The price of gas is a major reason. Gas prices are much higher today than in 2010. The national average price of self-serve regular gasoline as of mid-August is approximately 85 cents more than last year – that’s a 31 percent increase compared to the average for August 2010. Gas prices in Michigan are even higher than national averages – $3.71 a gallon, $1.02 more than last year. 

Care to take a guess as to how much less money this translates to in order to improve our road and transit systems? Well, let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope math and see what we come up with. If we have driven 15.5 billion fewer miles this year and let’s say we get an average of 25 miles per gallon in our car; that means we have used 750,000,000 fewer gallons of gas – a great thing, right? Now the federal gas tax is $0.184 per gallon. This means that we have paid $142,600,000 less in federal gas tax so far this year than last year. Feel good about that? Next time you are driving and complaining about the rough ride, or lose a hub cap, or are stuck in traffic, remember you are paying less and also remember the old saying, “You get what you pay for.” We are.