[00:00:00] Mike Wilkinson: Hello and welcome to Facts Matter, a podcast by Citizens Research Council of Michigan. I’m Mike Wilkinson, a reporter for Bridge Michigan, a nonpartisan nonprofit news outlet in Michigan covering the state. You can find us at bridgemi. com. My particular focus is on stories tied to data. And that’s why I was asked to guest host the Facts Batter podcast today with Eric Paul Dennis, a research analyst covering infrastructure with the Citizens Research Council of Michigan.

We’re going to talk to Eric about his latest report on Michigan’s roads. A hot button topic for years and the focus of multiple governors. How are you today, Eric? I’m great. Thank you for being here, Mike. Thanks, Eric. Let’s dive in. I’m a Michigan native, born in Detroit, raised in the suburbs of Metro Detroit, grew up in Macomb County.

I went to college in Michigan and I got my first reporting job in New Baltimore in Macomb County. But since 1987, I have lived elsewhere. I first moved to Illinois, then Tennessee, and now I live in Ohio, just over the border. For the past 17 years, including the last 10 at Bridge, I’ve worked for Michigan Publications.

I mention this because I think it gives me an almost daily opportunity to judge the roads of Michigan against those in Ohio. And I have to say, Michigan doesn’t fare too well. I know when I’ve crossed the border. Am I crazy or have I just become a Buckeye?

[00:01:23] Eric Paul Dennis: Well, I think some of that could be just a happenstance of where you live.

But what I was trying to do with this research project is aggregate whatever data is available and try to get a very objective idea of what the actual pavement conditions are state to state. And using that data, it does support most people’s intuition. So for on a national ranking level for Ohio, I have them coming out 11th compared to Michigan, which came out 40th.

[00:02:06] Mike Wilkinson: So I’m not

[00:02:07] Eric Paul Dennis: crazy. It would appear not. If you are crazy the data is supporting your insanity.

[00:02:15] Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. Every time I drive up there and I was mentioning to you, I went up to Lansing on Saturday and I was flabbergasted again by the rattling on I 96 westbound, just west of, of 23. It’s one of the, it’s a situation where you are almost forced to drive in the left.

And then the far left lane, the center of the far left lanes, which I think is not what road engineers or law enforcement wants you to do.

[00:02:40] Eric Paul Dennis: I know exactly. Okay. So that I 96 and it’s actually both westbound and eastbound around Brighton. I know exactly what you’re talking about. So I grew up in Fowlerville, which is just west of Brighton on 96.

And I used to commute that route. Almost daily. I’ve probably driven that stretch of highway. I’ve definitely driven that stretch of highway more than any other highway in the world. Probably more than most roads in the world. And so I’m very, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m very familiar with it.

That segment was completely reconstructed about 20 years ago. I think it opened in 2003. I still, I still remember actually the first time I drove that stretch after it opened, I was a civil engineering student at Michigan State University. I had also done some pavement work. So I was in a pretty good position to be observant and interested in that project.

But more importantly for this story, I had a Dashboard Jesus you know, one of those little like figurines that sit on your dashboard with the spring, it was spring loaded. And so if I went over potholes or anything, it would sway back and forth or go up and down. But that very first day that I drove on that brand new pavement, my spring loaded dashboard Jesus was just going crazy.

Bouncing up and down. This is brand new pavement. So what was happening there was there was even on that new pavement, there was a frequency of the road when you drove over it, it was wavy. And so the frequency of that road was actually matching a resonance frequency of the weighted spring of my dashboard.

Jesus, it was reflecting that that road, even when it was just opened, was not flat. So here’s what I think happened. This was one of the last concrete paving jobs where the surface elevation of the pavement was set with a string line level. We don’t do this anymore. Soon afterwards, we started doing stringless paving, basically using GPS and laser levels.

So this isn’t a problem we have anymore.

[00:04:59] Mike Wilkinson: Did those technologies exist back then? They

[00:05:01] Eric Paul Dennis: did. But they were very new then. And so this was kind of in the transition period between stringline paving and stringless paving. So the way that this used to happen is that the construction crew would. basically pound metal stakes into the side of the road and run a string along those stakes.

On the paving machine, there was a little wand that would stick out from the side, run along that string, and that’s how the machine would set the surface elevation of the pavement. Now, if your string line wasn’t tight enough or your stakes were set too far apart, the weight of the wand would push the string down just a bit.

between the stakes. And so you would get a slight but regularly spaced dip in the pavement surface. It would basically come out as a wave shape rather than being flat. So the pavement was not perfectly flat to begin with. It was wavy and uneven pavement like that invites exaggerated dynamic loading from weighted trucks as they ride that wave, they’re bouncing up and down and putting even more load on the pavement in regular intervals.

So that wave effect tends to become amplified as trucks drive across it. And so in just a few years, not only was my Spring loaded dashboard, Jesus recording this inconsistency in the pavement, but it was becoming evident in my car. It would become notable and uncomfortable. I’ve driven with people.

I’ve talked to, I drive this highway all the time. I talk about it all the time. And it makes people think that like their tie rod broke or their tire’s flat or something. It was a distress that was embedded in the pavement when it was constructed.

[00:06:55] Mike Wilkinson: And it lives on to this day because even when they fix it you just get this This washboard effect, but let’s use that as an example to talk about, you know, more broadly what your story what your, what your report gets at.

And there’s a decision that the state made on construction methods, but when we, as a reporter, I’ve talked to lots of transportation officials or, you know, a few, and they always seem to say, whenever this comes up about, you know, making roads in Michigan, that, you know, we have a unique weather.

We have so many frost. Frost freeze cycles. That’s what causes potholes and buckling roads to rupture and crack. I remember someone talking about some road work in Metro Detroit was problematic because of the unique soil composition, you know, how much sand, how much clay you have to do more work underneath the road to get it to drain properly.

Well, you first saw it in the report you did in January to find out what were the peer groups for Michigan. And apparently it’s not just the weather. We’re, we’re, and we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t compare Michigan to Hawaii, which last I checked does not have any frost free cycles. So tell me how you decided to compare Michigan to these 10 other states, which include Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, which would make sense, but they also include Georgia and Virginia.

I guess it’s not just the weather.

[00:08:14] Eric Paul Dennis: No, weather is a factor, and so I have one of my kind of side projects is trying to figure out how to quantify the impact of climate on the costs of maintaining pavement. There’s a few things I can say about this. One, yes, our freeze thaw cycle is a factor. But several other states also go through a freeze thaw cycle and several, all states have some kind of climate or geological complication that their road agencies have to deal with.

Additionally, Water, you should be constructing and maintaining your road so that water does not get in your pavement cross section. If you do that, then your freeze thaw cycling just isn’t an issue. It’s only when your pavement gets to a point where water is either infiltrating through surface cracks, or often One thing that I see a lot, especially on rural roads, is that shoulders are not graded to allow water to run away from the pavement.

There’s often kind of a rut on right where the pavement meets the gravel shoulder. And so water sits there, infiltrates, and gets under your pavement surface. And so that you get rapid degradation and rutting of the pavement kind of near the pavement. the, the outer edge line. So climate is a factor. When I was looking at peer states, it was about nine percent of the, the calculation of how I selected peer states.

It’s actually not nearly as much of a factor as truck traffic which was equally weighted to climate when I was doing this as 9%. But what else I was looking for was kind of the economic and land use makeup of the state, because that influences a lot of how far your. road dollars will go. If you have a a much more urban population road construction is a lot more expensive in those areas.

It’s cheaper in rural areas. But if you have a very sprawled urban population, you have a lot more roads that are subject to traffic than if you have. Like a dense urban core that very quickly goes out into rural areas. So a lot of people intuitively would think that Minnesota would be a peer state for Michigan.

I did not find that for one reason, Minnesota is generally a much more rural state. They have the twin cities, but in the twin cities, it’s fairly dense. And then it gets out into very rural areas. Lightly populated rural areas very quickly. Additionally, Minnesota, if you actually look at their climate is what we would call a dry freeze state, which imposes less, much less climactic pressure on the pavement.

If it snows and it’s dry, the snow just blows off the pavement or it gets plowed off without tending to the climate. Thaw and infiltrate underneath of it. So Minnesota is actually much more like North Dakota, South Dakota. It’s when you get a little bit East into the Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York.

Then you get this fairly challenging freeze thaw cycle that if you don’t maintain your pavement in good condition. Once you start allowing water to infiltrate into the pavement cross section, that freeze thaw cycling can be a big problem.

[00:12:11] Mike Wilkinson: So, you just mentioned a number of the states that you compared.

So, let’s talk a little bit more about that. You, you know, they’re unfortunately for the purposes of what you did, there’s not a federal agency with the same team of of evaluators going from state to state and giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to road. You can’t just, you know, download a spreadsheet of great data that compares Michigan and Ohio.

You have to use other tricks and other tools. And you used, you looked at a number of data sets looking at a number of different kind of roads over multiple years. And that’s how, and then you ranked them. And that’s how you came up with Michigan being 10th of the 11 peer states. I’m wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about what those different roads, those different data sets show you in terms of how Michigan stacks up in terms of the percentage of good, poor and fair roads and, and the other factors you mentioned, the rutting and the buckling just tell us a little bit about how Michigan stacks up on those different measures.

[00:13:09] Eric Paul Dennis: All of this data ultimately comes from a federal program called the Highway Performance Monitoring System. The federal government classifies federal aid roads in different ways. So at the lowest classification of federal aid roads is just the federal aid eligible system.

And in Michigan, I think about 33 percent of our system by route miles is federal aid eligible. Those roads can get federal dollars. The next step up is the National Highway System, which includes kind of our most strategically, nationally important corridors. So this would include all of the interstates as well as other main roads that are for one reason or another considered strategically important.

So that’s the National Highway System. Michigan’s our public road network in Michigan, I think is about six percent on the National Highway System. And then the highest level where we have the best data is the interstate system. And so the federal government takes all this data from the Highway Performance Monitoring system.

Program and then republishes it in various ways with various levels of aggregation and disaggregation, depending on that system. So the, the broadest scope for where I can get any data is our federal aid eligible system, but that’s also kind of the least important. So in that system I have. I can get four individual metrics roughness, or what we would usually, yeah, I’ll just say roughness as well as cracking, rutting, and faulting.

And those aren’t really put together in any kind of coherent way. So I have to look at those individually. Additionally on that system, unfortunately, the most recent data that I can get is from the year 2020. I’ve been talking to, or emailing with FHWA and they said they’ve had software issues that have prevented them from updating this on a more frequent basis, but hopefully they will, they say they’re hoping to have 2023 data.

Before the end of this year. So I’m hoping to update that. But for now,

[00:15:30] Mike Wilkinson: let me start real quick. But you said there was some data from having read the report. That’s from 2021. That is from. 22 from what I recall. So it’s not just the old stuff. You have some more, more recent material. Do you not? Or is it, or the reports from them?

[00:15:44] Eric Paul Dennis: Yes. So the more constricted national highway system, I do have data from 2021 and 2022.

[00:15:53] Mike Wilkinson: By almost any measure, and I think that’s where the weight of your report comes through, is you can look at the older data, you can look at the more recent data, and the story is still the same.

Michigan does not do well. And in fact, it does quite poorly. And if you’re looking at your peer states, I mean, the only one Michigan can look, look down at is Illinois. And Illinois as a state has had a, has had a number of problems not the least of which is, is population loss, which is, has been been growing over the years.

So what I wanted to ask you about is When you look at these different programs and what you can look at, where were the biggest gaps between us and the other states? Was it the interstates and state highways? I know there’s some, some trouble to find, you know, comparisons of the local roads, but one thing that struck me is we’re okay on the percentage of roads that are in good condition.

I think that’s what your report says, but we’re among the worst in the percentage that are poor. So if you could, wonder if you could talk about that interstates and state highways, please. versus the locals and some of the gaps that you see where Michigan does not fare well.

[00:16:55] Eric Paul Dennis: Yeah, that did seem to be a trend in this data.

Generally we do seem to be doing okay in the percentage of pavement in good condition. But quite poorly in the percentage of pavement in poor condition. Now, I think part of this has to do with our, our recent bonding program.

We’ve been putting a lot of money in bringing pavement from poor to good, brand new pavement. But there also might be. Be a causative element there of us not being able to maintain pavement in fair condition as well as some other states are doing. I don’t have any hard conclusions on that yet, but that is definitely something I’m looking at.

[00:17:49] Mike Wilkinson: Okay. This has been a topic in the state. For a long time when you look, you just mentioned the, the additional spending that has happened since 2020 governor Whitmer has borrowed 3. 5 billion. The last of that money, 700 million is going to be used this year. What do you see any hopeful signs in the quality of the mission of the state’s roads?

[00:18:10] Eric Paul Dennis: Yeah, actually. So this wasn’t part of an intentional part of the. Analysis that I’ve been doing recently because I’ve been what I’ve been doing to assess pavement quality is trying to get the most recent pavement condition data available. However, 2 or 3 months ago, when I was in the middle of this and already had some preliminary work done, the FHWA published some data on the national highway system.

That was updated from 2020 to 2022. And so I could just incidentally look across from 2020 to 2022 to see how we were faring. And one thing I noticed is that the increased federal funding seems to be doing its job. Almost every single state in the nation on like their, their raw data, their percentage good, their percentage poor had improved from 2020 to 2022.

But Michigan had actually improved more than the typical state. We jumped up several spaces if you were to rank them. So it, it does look like we are getting better and the nation as a whole is getting better.

[00:19:24] Mike Wilkinson: Well, that’s good. That’s good to hear. I was looking just the other day at my email and I almost can’t go a single day.

Or at least a week without the governor touting another railroad or bridge project. So maybe that is bearing some, some fruit. But one thing, you know, and that governor, Governor Whitmer has made fixing the roads a priority and a political slogan. I wondered is it too early to judge all of the results of those efforts?

[00:19:50] Eric Paul Dennis: So more money Going into the system helps. I think it is too early to see how long lasting those results will be. It will, Michigan the Michigan Department of Transportation will now be challenged in the future because that bonding has to be repaid out of the trunk line fund. And so that’s less revenue that they’ll have to be able to maintain the new roads that they just built.

And as I mentioned a few minutes ago, there is some evidence that we’ve already we don’t do very well in maintaining roads in good condition. We, compared to other states, allow them to fall from good to poor relatively quickly without doing the regular maintenance that would allow them to be in fair condition, which is where you’re really getting.

The most big bang for your buck. You want to maintain your pavements in fair condition for as long as possible before you have to do a complete reconstruct.

[00:20:53] Mike Wilkinson: So you’ve identified in a pretty exhaustive way, as with the best data available, that the state does lag others. It apparently is getting better. I, you know, and this is not a new problem.

It’s been going back. Quite a while. You had Governor Snyder try to pro push proposal 20, proposal one in 2015 which would’ve raised the sales tax, but taken it off of gasoline that the voters projected that 80% to 20%. You have the Michigan ranks sixth in terms of overall gas taxes, but two fifths of that is the sales tax, which still is on it.

That doesn’t go to roads. I’m wondering, I mean, do what is going to one, if. Is funding the cause, if you know, and is getting more money for roads going to be a solution going forward? We’ve talked about this for a number of years. And as you just mentioned, you know, you borrow the money, but whenever you borrow money, you always have to pay it back.

[00:21:45] Eric Paul Dennis: This is the core direction that my research is heading now. It’s. I’m probably not going to be focused on gas taxes. Gas taxes are a component of where we get our revenue. But the revenue the system of driving road funding in every state is different and can be complicated. There are other states that have More allowances for locals to fund their road through gas taxes or what they call wheel fees or things like that.

But the data sets that I’m working with have, they allow me to kind of. Bypass those details and I can get a comprehensive revenues and expenditures on highways, which would include all of those things. And so that’s what I’m looking at now. But I don’t have any results yet.

[00:22:38] Mike Wilkinson: Well, you’re at the bottom of your report.

You had some caveats and and some cautions. I mean, this is you, you, you, you decided what would be get the most weight. I wonder if you could just share with the listeners, what some of those caveats or cautions might be.

[00:22:51] Eric Paul Dennis: I mean, the hardest thing, it does bother me that I, for the data that I’m reasonably confident in the most recent data is 2021 Some of it in 2022, but that’s only on our national highway system, which in Michigan is 6 percent of our roads.

So if we want to say anything about any more of our roads, I have to go back to the 2020 data and Michigan uniquely did not report any 2020 data. So Michigan’s 2019 data is embedded in that. So that’s going way far back. So this can, I would really consider this more of a recent historical baseline. But I will be looking at also historical funding levels to match that historical baseline and get a good idea of how our management approach is making the best use of that money.

And as I mentioned before, hopefully I will be able to get new. Both more recent pavement condition data, as well as more recent funding data before the end of this year. But there is, this is not as clean of data as would be ideal to say something very specific about pavement condition, which is why when I did this, I didn’t just use one or two or three metrics, I combined 17 into a comprehensive metric, and I have.

Another few dozen that I could have used but the 17 that I used were meant to basically capture as much as I could without being too redundant. There are different ways that you could do this, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of saying as much about pavement condition in each state as you possibly could with the data that’s available.

[00:24:48] Mike Wilkinson: The other measures that you did not include, did Michigan rise above everyone else on any of them?

[00:24:55] Eric Paul Dennis: No, they, so the other metrics would just be different ways of disaggregating the data. So for example, when it’s report, when the HPMS data is reported to the federal government and then re reported from the federal government, They often do things like divide it into rural and urban areas.

And so you could break it out that way which I didn’t do in the ranking, but you could look at things like that. You could more disaggregate it by functional class. So you could look at interstates versus non interstate freeways versus major arterials versus minor arterials, major collectors, minor collectors, divide all that into urban and rural, things like that.

So I have all sorts of tables and charts that say things like that, but they, all of that disaggregated data is basically included in the aggregated data that I used for the the, the index score that I used to do the ranking.

[00:26:04] Mike Wilkinson: And it probably tells the same story that Michigan has, at least in terms of roads, is, is not keeping up with its peers.

[00:26:11] Eric Paul Dennis: Yeah, there’s some, there’s some interesting outliers here and there that may or may not be explainable, but generally the, the data tells kind of a story of democracy. All of the data points voting together show us. 40th in the nation, 10th out of 11 peer states. And I’m fairly comfortable that this is representative of the actual conditions on the ground.

[00:26:35] Mike Wilkinson: And as someone who drives across the state line all the time, as I did this morning I would tend to agree that your, your conclusions are valid. Again, I’m Mike Wilkinson with Bridge Michigan, and I’ve been speaking with Eric Dennis with the CRC of Michigan. You can find them online at crcmich. org and on X, formerly known as Twitter, at, at CRC Mich, this is Facts Matter.

A podcast presentation of the Citizens Research Council.