Stay Focused

It is now mid-August, more than three months since Prop 1 failed miserably at the polls. I made a number of presentations about the proposal and was told repeatedly by the faithful that the legislature would handle it once the people voted it down. Plan B was alive and well. Well, Prop 1 did have problems – let’s be honest – but the legislature is no closer to passing Plan B now than it was in May. Yes, I know both the house and the senate have passed separate bills, but they are as different as night and day and very hard to compromise. One side will have to give in.

In recent weeks, we have heard discussions on how the engineering community in Michigan doesn’t know how to build a road that lasts. We have legislators talking about doubling the life of a road with only a 15 percent increase in capital costs. We have heard how the road agencies have squandered money on bad materials and made poor decisions.

These are the reasons we are being fed for the poor condition of our roads, but nothing could be further from the truth. Isn’t it interesting that back in 2004, just over 10 percent of our major roadway network was in poor condition, according to the Transportation Asset Management Council’s annual survey of pavement condition. Today, almost 50 percent of that same system is now in poor condition. Did our engineers all of a sudden forget how to build and maintain roads? Did we start using poor materials in the past 11 years? All of this discussion does nothing but take our focus away from the main reason we are in this situation in the first place – the underfunding of our transportation assets over a long period of time!

Let me refocus your attention on a few facts :

• The last time the state gas tax was increased was 1997 – 18 years ago! Then, it was increased by 4 cents from 15 cents to 19 cents a gallon. As a point of reference, Ohio’s gas tax was at 22 cents in 1997; they have raised it by 6 cents a gallon over the same period and it’s now at 28 cents – no wonder their roads are in better shape than ours!
• The 6-cent sales tax you pay on gas does not go to fix roads or improve public transit – it goes to the state’s general fund primarily for schools and local government revenue sharing. When the price of gas is over $3.36 a gallon, the sales tax generates more money than the gas tax itself.
• The last time public transit had an increase in funding was 1987 – almost 30 years ago!
• The total dollars you pay in gas tax has actually decreased. As cars have become more fuel efficient they need fewer gallons of gas to drive the same number of miles. A 1987 Ford Taurus got 20 miles per gallon, while a 2015 Taurus gets 26 mpg. You would have bought 500 gallons of gas in 1987 to drive 10,000 miles – but only 385 gallons of gas to drive the same 10,000 miles today!
• While road agencies have become much more efficient given the fiscal realities they have endured, it has become impossible to do any more with less. Now they are doing less with less!

And by the way, we started this latest increased funding discussion in 2011. At that time, the “number” that was identified through a technical process was an additional $1.4 billion – not the $1.2 billion being bandied about. Friends, we are four years down the crumbling road and that $1.2 billion is still the number being discussed. It should be a lot closer $2 billion and the more the legislature fiddles the time away, the more this dollar figure needs to increase if you are going to see meaningful improvement.

Soon it will be 2016 – an election year – and all discussion of increased funding will stop. Another year of inaction will lead to more miles of poor roads and additional costs for fixing them. Another winter is coming to once again stress a road system being held together by band aids and all of the knowledge and experience our engineering community has. Don’t be distracted by all of the smoke and mirrors being thrown out for how we got here. Do the math. Hold your elected officials in Lansing accountable. Tell them enough already – let’s come together and fix our roads now.