Paved roads are reverting to gravel.
I guess this is the kind of “progress” that results from “progressive” polices like the ones the Democrats have delivered in the Great Lakes State.
18 thoughts on “More Hope And Change In Michigan”
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If current trends hold, they’ll be back to dirt roads in a few years. It’s easier on the horses’ hooves.
I don’t wish to disparage the roads of Michigan, but I have to ask…
If the road is relatively untraveled, what is wrong with it being gravel? I grew up on a washboard road that got plowed annually, whether or not it needed it (and it always needed it).
In rural areas, gravel (or decomposed granite) upper courses are an economical way of maintaining mobility.
The cost of maintaining roads is quite high. I do not see what is so strange about downsizing in a crisis.
I don’t want to reduce this to partisan sniping, but there are some forms of downsizing that help in a crisis and some that make the crisis worse. My first impression was that there was a game of budgetary chicken going on. “Pay for our pet projects or we’ll turn your roads into gravel.”
But given that a quarter of Michigan counties are doing this, it’s probably more than that. I don’t believe that they are so short of money that they can’t maintain roads and other important infrastructure. Instead, I imagine they are suffering from mandated spending at the state and perhaps even federal level. Namely, they might be required to maintain spending on various entitlements, but not on the roads. So when cuts in spending have to be done, they’ll be in spending that can be cut rather than spending that should be cut.
And to answer the previous two posters, if the roads were relatively untraveled, then why did they get paved in the first place?
Having once lived in a residential neighborhood served by gravel roads, I can say that maintenance of gravel surfaces is more time-consuming than paved; a paved road can withstand neglect for quite some time before it becomes unusable, but a gravel road can be washed out and made impassable by one good heavy rain. That means crews and equipment on the scene a lot more often if the road isn’t simply being left to nature’s tender mercies.
Leaving a paved road to disintegrate completely is a bad idea for those who use it because bad pavement is worse than good gravel — but if the pavement is still in decent condition, turning it to gravel is throwing bad money before even more bad money. The question is what condition these paved roads were in before they were torn up.
Karl, if they aren’t travelled, it’s because the economy has deteriorated to the point that people can’t afford to go there any more. Much of upper Michigan is dependent on tourism and recreation, and that provided the funding in the past to provide good roads for the tourists and vacationers from down south. While the general economy hurts tourism, the local economy has devastated property values of vacation homes up north, and presumably local counties no longer have the funds to maintain the roads.
I remember, growing up in Michigan, three or four decades ago, the good quality of the roads throughout the state (though you could tell one county from another by the quality of the highway, including US and interstate, when you passed from one to the next). Now most counties are in the dumpster financially.
Thanks, Lansing. And the UAW.
if the roads were relatively untraveled, then why did they get paved in the first place?
Just speculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised that there were years with a surplus of gas tax receipts and money that had to be spent on roads or lost. Money that might have been usable only for new paving, not maintenence. To the counties it was all free money. They might have even overengineered those roads, so they lasted for a few decades with the occasion “chip-and-seal” and pothole filled. Now they’ve reached the end of their lifetime, and so are all falling apart all seemingly at once.
So it could very well be those roads should not have been paved in the first place, and wouldn’t have if it had been companies subject to economic forces making those decisions. But the paving decisions were almost certainly political. (I’m certain more than a few county commissioners’ cousins were in the paving business, too.)
That could be, Raoul, but the point was that when many of those roads were paved, back in the sixties, Michigan was an economic powerhouse. It made a lot of sense to make it easier for auto workers with second homes up north for hunting, fishing, berrying and boating, to get there and get around up there.
Not to throw salt in the wound but the Texas counties around and including mine have been paving roads steadily the last five years. A sign of the times.
Well, I’m not sure Texas is such a great example of a an economic powerhouse, regardless of how many roads the state is paving….
100 poorest counties by per capita income
Income in the United States
Number of counties by state in the 100 poorest counties: Texas, 17; Kentucky, 16; Mississippi, 14; South Dakota, 10; Louisiana, 5; Alabama, 4; Georgia, 4; Montana, 4; New Mexico, 4; North Dakota, 3; Arizona, 2; Idaho, 2; Nebraska, 2; Tennessee, 2; West Virginia, 2; Alaska, 1; Arkansas, 1; Colorado, 1; Florida, 1; Missouri, 1; Oklahoma, 1; South Carolina, 1; Utah, 1; Wisconsin, 1. Twenty-six states do not have any counties in the 100 poorest counties.
No, it’s the kind of “progress” that results from the greed and stupidity of those among the great American public that think it’s perfectly OK to gamble with your house to buy the latest toys from China, aided and abetted by the greed, stupidity and criminality of American bankers who think it’s perfectly OK to tell people to lie on the forms to get mortgage extensions, in order to get the bankers their monstrously excessive bonuses.
Also aided and abetted, in the case of Michigan, by an unholy alliance of ineffective, short-termist managers and greedy, lazy union “workers” who wanted to continue to make wasteful, ostentatious junk cars that an ever-increasing proportion of Americans didn’t want to buy.
None of that would bother me at all, except that these unholy alliances have wrecked the rest of the world’s economy in the process.
I’m not sure that number of “poor” counties is that useful a measure, absent knowing how many people actually live in them.
Change we can believe in?
Detroit 2/3rds empty as it depopulates (hunters now hunt wild animals in abandoned sections of the city), economy cratering as Mich government chases out busness’s that try to invade the state or domestic undocumented capitalists. [Had a budy try to start up a new manufacturing facility in Mich. He did not get a warm responce.] And they are letting the roads go from badly potholed back to gravel and washed out.
Something wrong with this picture.
Something wrong with this picture.
Yes. Why are people still living there?
Well, I’m not sure Texas is such a great example of a an economic powerhouse, regardless of how many roads the state is paving….
In a time when many states are experiencing fiscal crises and economic decline, one state stands out above all others as a success story: Texas. I recently heard Governor Tim Pawlenty say that during the year or so before job growth turned negative and the country as a whole was still adding payroll jobs, 53% of all of the jobs created in the U.S. were created in one state: Texas. No wonder that Texas’ government is running a surplus and its economy remains strong despite trying times.
Just a small note re: Texas and poor counties:
Texas counties are unusually numerous and unusually small for the size of the state. Once you get west of the Spanish / Mexican colonial grants, the counties are surveyed squares (25 townships) or rectangles. The further west, the dryer, and the less populated.
Geographically remote and dry parts of Texas have small, poor populations, just like anywhere else. The difference is that in other states (like, say, California) the counties are large enough to balance out their poor regions with wealthier regions. Not so in Texas… or any other place that has a plethora of small municipal county-like districts.
Yes, it’s no surprise that in the second largest state by area, with many counties, many of them are going to be poor, and it will have the most in the country. It’s a pretty meaningless statistic when it comes to determining the state of health of the Texas economy.
100 poorest counties by per capita income
Income in the United States
Per-capita income is a poor way to measure poverty, as it does not take cost-of-living into account. Notice that all of those “poor” counties are in the heartland where the cost-of-living is a small fraction of that in the coastal states. To compare standards of living among different regions you need to adjust per-capita income for cost-of-living (known as purchasing power parity). That may or may not yield different results than the above list, but I bet it does.