For those of you who may have missed it, the Detroit Free Press on Sunday ran a front page story about our decaying Michigan roads. That’s hardly breaking news for those of us who do any amount of travel around our city. With record snowfall, record cold and road crews running through record amounts of salt to keep our roads clear, it’s no wonder our streets are crumbling at a record pace.

But Michigan isn’t the only state that gets snow and cold. Yet, our roads seem to deteriorate at a much faster rate. Might the poor condition of our roads be partially a result of Michigan having the highest truck weight limits allowed in the Midwest? 

Potholes along Michigan Avenue in West Dearborn are making the daily commute a painful one.

Travel along the quilted patchwork of asphalt and concrete that now makes up Michigan Avenue between Outer Drive and Brady in Dearborn and it’s as if the repairs done just before winter never occurred. Making matters worse, repairs to the first repairs won’t be coming anytime soon. So this could get ugly . . . and fast, particularly since we have two more months of winter left.

When you combine those high weight truck limits with thawing and freezing, along with the poor upkeep of our roads, you get the surfaces we have today. Drive along roads where heavy trucks don’t travel and the roads are typically in better condition.

Yet, road commissioners from Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties in the Detroit Free Press article all point to the weather as the main culprit.

• “It’s not a very good situation,” Lorenzo Blount, Wayne County roads division director, said last week. “It’s been a very cold winter. If it gets warm really quickly, you get that freeze-thaw, and it gets ugly.”
• “It’s just been so cold so long,” Bob Hoepfner, highway engineer for the Road Commission of Macomb County said. “When the ground thaws, that’s really when we’re going to see the breakup of our roadways.”
• Craig Bryson, spokesman for the Road Commission for Oakland County, said a series of wicked freeze-thaw cycles could make the pothole situation worse than last year’s prodigious crop.

Declining gas-tax revenues means Michigan’s funding for construction and maintenance of expressways and major state roads has dwindled to about $900 million in 2009, from highs of around $1.5 billion earlier this decade, according to the Free Press.

County and local road agencies also are falling farther behind because their primary sources of road funding – state fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees – have been steadily declining for several years. 

A task force appointed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm concluded last fall that the state needs an additional $3 billion a year to get all state and local roads into good shape. That’s about double what’s currently being spent statewide.

And we can forget about our state roads getting relief from President Barack Obama’s new stimulus package. As it stands now, the money can’t be used for routine maintenance like pothole patching.

Strap in. Our daily drives unfortunately are going to get a lot worse before we see any real road repairs.