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Proposal One, the sales tax is probably defeated already? This seems easily so according to poll results.
The Gasoline tax should be earmarked for fixing the infrastructure only. Agreed, stop using funding for road repair for other purposes.
I have heard so many views on this topic that differ. Misinformation, given from different takes.
I am leaning against now, that is I have changed my mind and am no longer positive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by animatedmartian
Gasoline tax is only earmarked for infrastructure. Sales tax, which taxes gasoline sales, is not.
Our roads, full of potholes and littered with trash, make even expensive areas look like ghetto. Why would any prestigious college graduate with an in-demand degree want to come back here, let alone relocate ? No wonder they are closing schools and building retirement homes instead, the population is aging and shrinking, successful young people don't want to live here if they have a choice. Roads and litter are just part of the problem.
Too many people don't seem to realize that you can't get something for nothing. On top of this, the people in Michigan also tend to put up with local governments doing things that would cause a recall elsewhere. In most metropolitan areas I worked and stayed at for extended time, all work on the major roads was done at night whenever possible, and cleared up by the morning rush. In Atlanta, I'd be driving on the freeway at 5:45 am and the road crew would be already clearing the cones they put up the night before, then the following night put them up again and do more work. Here, they block the road off for days, leaving just one lane, and only show up for work after 7 am while hundreds of drivers have already been stuck in a jam for an hour looking at orange cones with no workers in sight.
So I guess we have the government we deserve, and the roads we deserve. And the lifestyle we deserve. And any attempt to solve this problem will get voted down because we'd rather live in a trash covered pothole than spend a penny more on fixing it while trying to hold those doing the fix accountable.
Last edited by Ummagumma; 04-18-2015 at 09:11 AM..
Michigan's current gas tax is 19 cents. Ohio's gas tax is 28 cents, and Wisconsin's is 30 cents. Even Minnesota has a 28 cent tax. All those taxes go 100% into road funding.
Minnesota has 7% sales tax. Ohio has a 5% sales tax, but a lot of cities that have additional sales tax. Wisconsin has a 5% sales tax. All of these taxes go 100% into local governments and school districts.
That is ridiculous, 1% of the State sales tax goes into road funding? Given the state of streets and bridges
I would say the state needs to re-think its' priorities.
Anywhere you drive here, the car constantly slams and bounces in and out of potholes. This is crazy.
It just cannot keep going on like this.
Answer this also. What is it with some of these gas stations that charge more for a gallon of gasoline if it is purchased with a debit or credit card?
Other stations don't ? NOT just one transaction fee either, but a surcharge on each individual gallon?
To the person comparing road building here with Atlanta's. Atlanta is a place where it is very,very simple to build a road. They take their sweet time because they can, Here time is limited because of the severity of the winters. It must be done very well and in a hurry, that is to say very rapidly because soon it will become very cold and camp. The snow will inevitably fly soon and all will be lost that is not finished. Accuracy and timeliness are of the essence.
Plus.... they pay their road builders very little pay in Atlanta so they do not care how long it will take and the quality of the final product is not as good as here. Standards are lower there for labor and quality of product.
We are better at it because we have to be.
The truck traffic is much worse and heavier , there is a lot of industry here - all of this, plus on top of this the ground freezes and heaves up and down pushes in and out, up and down so finished roads have to be built to far more rigorous standards here .Water freezes and thaws and breaks the smallest of imperfections in the concrete of the street surface, nightly, for much of the year.
Added to all of this....
The ground in Michigan is notoriously bad, unstable, and many times more difficult to build a road bed upon to begin with. Swampy, mushy, wetlands type of ground etc. The infrastructure here simply will not last as long as Atlanta's for these same reasons.
Atlanta road builders do not have to be as skilled at what they do because it is so much simpler and of lower quality. That is why they can go home early. It does not make any difference anyway.
Michigan's current gas tax is 19 cents. Ohio's gas tax is 28 cents, and Wisconsin's is 30 cents. Even Minnesota has a 28 cent tax. All those taxes go 100% into road funding.
Minnesota has 7% sales tax. Ohio has a 5% sales tax, but a lot of cities that have additional sales tax. Wisconsin has a 5% sales tax. All of these taxes go 100% into local governments and school districts.
Our roads, full of potholes and littered with trash, make even expensive areas look like ghetto. Why would any prestigious college graduate with an in-demand degree want to come back here, let alone relocate ? No wonder they are closing schools and building retirement homes instead, the population is aging and shrinking, successful young people don't want to live here if they have a choice. Roads and litter are just part of the problem.
Too many people don't seem to realize that you can't get something for nothing. On top of this, the people in Michigan also tend to put up with local governments doing things that would cause a recall elsewhere. In most metropolitan areas I worked and stayed at for extended time, all work on the major roads was done at night whenever possible, and cleared up by the morning rush. In Atlanta, I'd be driving on the freeway at 5:45 am and the road crew would be already clearing the cones they put up the night before, then the following night put them up again and do more work. Here, they block the road off for days, leaving just one lane, and only show up for work after 7 am while hundreds of drivers have already been stuck in a jam for an hour looking at orange cones with no workers in sight.
So I guess we have the government we deserve, and the roads we deserve. And the lifestyle we deserve. And any attempt to solve this problem will get voted down because we'd rather live in a trash covered pothole than spend a penny more on fixing it while trying to hold those doing the fix accountable.
Atlanta does not have our weather and can get away with asphalt over base. If we do that, it will not last very long. Most of our roads are concrete. Some have asphalt over the concrete. We have pure asphalt roads, but they are always in need of repair. Asphalt can only be placed in large quantities when it is warm. That means they have limited time to get it down and they cannot work only at night. Night work is slow and costly. Keep in mind they cannot work at night when it gets cold (like right now for example, they could place asphalt during the day, but it is too cold at night). At times, they do night work here, but it is usually round the clock work. Bridges are generally removed and put in place at night.
What is surprising to me here compared to several other states is they close miles of freeway, multiple lanes and only work on a small area of one lane at a time. Many places only allow them to close a small work area and the cars are wizzing by right next to the workers. Some places place K rail to protect the workers, some do not. The Michigan way is more focused on worker safety than commuter convenience. I would prefer a little inconvenience to having someone die so I do not get slowed down quite as much. However I agree, we frequently do overkill here. Indiana and Ohio do as well. It seems to be a regional thing.
Atlanta does not have our weather and can get away with asphalt over base. If we do that, it will not last very long. Most of our roads are concrete. Some have asphalt over the concrete. We have pure asphalt roads, but they are always in need of repair. Asphalt can only be placed in large quantities when it is warm. That means they have limited time to get it down and they cannot work only at night. Night work is slow and costly. Keep in mind they cannot work at night when it gets cold (like right now for example, they could place asphalt during the day, but it is too cold at night). At times, they do night work here, but it is usually round the clock work. Bridges are generally removed and put in place at night.
What is surprising to me here compared to several other states is they close miles of freeway, multiple lanes and only work on a small area of one lane at a time. Many places only allow them to close a small work area and the cars are wizzing by right next to the workers. Some places place K rail to protect the workers, some do not. The Michigan way is more focused on worker safety than commuter convenience. I would prefer a little inconvenience to having someone die so I do not get slowed down quite as much. However I agree, we frequently do overkill here. Indiana and Ohio do as well. It seems to be a regional thing.
I was referring to how they schedule work in Atlanta, not what kind of work they do.
The vast majority of road repair projects here are just resurfacing over old concrete - and they close it off during rush traffic. And since most of that work is being done in summer, I don't see how Atlanta has an advantage over MI here. I suspect that in Atlanta, if the city closed off a major artery during the day and made people's lives hell without a very good reason, the city would get a new government the very next election. Here, we have people like Patterson sitting in the office for decades despite the sorry state his county is in after more than 20 years of his rule.
Atlanta does not have a race against the clock. The weather will be bad as early as Sept. here.
Southern states can pave and road prepare subgrade all year long with very ,very little pause...not at all.
Here inclement weather , even in the spring and fall, forces highway and heavy contractors to speed up the work within the span of only a very few months. It is not at all the same thing. Fundamentally Atlanta's road builders are wimps, that are spoiled. They can take their time, sweet time, do night work, that simply cannot be done in Michigan. Asphalt paving and concrete paving is done at night here, if time is of the essence. That is the easy part.
The paving is the easy part, it is the underground part of the equations and the subsurface road preparation that is so crucial, painstaking.
Nightwork is done here on occasion. However it is less productive, so much so that generally it is not worth the extra money and time. Sometimes if it is a high volume highway that must be finished as soon as possible,they do work at night.
They are true professional road builders here in the northland.
Yes, and they build roads, streets and infrastructure to far higher and more rigorous standards in Michigan because they must do so. Water and sewer piplelines are buried much deeper because of ground frost which reaches down so deep, and so is far more costly and time consuming. The volume of trucking is staggering and load restrictions (Weights of cargo ) are also less restrictive because of the extra volume of incoming shipping freight from boats. Not only because of Detroit to Chicago's massive industrial capacity- but also because these two are also port towns. The volume of shipping along with the industrial capacities of these two cities and then include the subzero winter temps. and extremely short number of days there are annually to build these roads to far higher standards and you can perhaps understand why road building techniques of Atlanta will simply not work here. The volume of traffic is far heavier both in numbers and weight of loads.
IF the destructive- road destroying- overload- that trucks are allowed to haul here in Michigan were altered- lightened- in order to make roads last longer the volume of truck traffic would be over whelming.
The number of semis on the road here is always too much as it is.
The southern states allow 60,000 or at most 80,000 lbs to be hauled legally over the road. Weight limits.
Michigan allows 160,000 lbs to hauled on the highways here. They must do this here, there is too much truck traffic to lower these weight limits.
There are the advantages, some of them. There are more, soil types, shallow ground water table, and other factors also complicate things even more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ummagumma
I was referring to how they schedule work in Atlanta, not what kind of work they do.
The vast majority of road repair projects here are just resurfacing over old concrete - and they close it off during rush traffic. And since most of that work is being done in summer, I don't see how Atlanta has an advantage over MI here. I suspect that in Atlanta, if the city closed off a major artery during the day and made people's lives hell without a very good reason, the city would get a new government the very next election. Here, we have people like Patterson sitting in the office for decades despite the sorry state his county is in after more than 20 years of his rule.
Within two years- 50% of Mi roads and bridges will be in disrepair a study was
quoted today, on the disrepair of Michigans crumbling roads..
Right now,33% are in a failed state. Maybe the "study" report was a politically motivated "study". I very well believe the statistic. Ker-pow goes the car, with the potholes I don't dodge the car out of the way of.
Something has to change, the roads will only get worse with each passing winter.
I hate to pay more for a state auto registration fee but maybe it is THE thing to do.
Last edited by huckster; 04-20-2015 at 01:58 PM..
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Guess,
