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Narrator: It's time for Talking Michigan Transportation, a podcast devoted to the conversations with people at the forefront of the ongoing mobility revolution. In the state that put the world on wheels, here's your host, MDOT Communications Director Jeff Cranson.
Jeff Cranson: Welcome to the Talking Michigan Transportation podcast, this is Jeff Cranson. I am the Communications Director at the Michigan Department of Transportation. This is my weekly conversation with people that really have anything insightful to say about mobility - some inside the department, some outside - and this week I'm talking with Chad Livengood who is a senior editor at Crain's Detroit Business, and has been writing about transportation and road issues for some time, so thanks for coming on, Chad.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, thanks Jeff. When I moved back to Michigan in February of 2012 I had been out of state for four years as a political reporter in Delaware and Missouri, split time covering those two legislatures, and when I came back and joined the Detroit News and was in the Lansing bureau, Gary Heinlein - long time Lansing bureau reporter for the news, now retired - one of his first, sort of, insightful comments to me was ‘we’ll never write enough about the roads.’
Chad Livengood: He was like ‘the legislature will do something, we’ll write about it, and then the roads will get worse again, and we’ll start writing about it.’ It's a perpetual story, and it's good for maintaining long employment in the news business.
Jeff Cranson: You know, it's funny you say that, because when I was the political editor at the Grand Rapids Press and working with Peter Luke - who was our Lansing bureau reporter and he was a veteran just like Gary - and he said the same thing. So, that was pretty well understood in the Capitol press corps, I guess, in those days.
Chad Livengood: Peter did that, wrote about roads for 25-30 years, and it just never seems to go away as an issue.
Jeff Cranson: So, talk about why you think that is. Why is it so difficult in Michigan - and I don't want to make it sound like Michigan's the only state that's had a problem with this, there are other states that have been trying to do various things and having a tough time - but a lot of our neighbors in recent years have passed increases. Pennsylvania obviously passed one of the biggest in the in the country, and has really, kind of, righted the ship in terms of repairing their bridges and roads. Ohio, which already had a higher fuel tax than Michigan, added another ten cents recently. Why do you think this is so difficult here?
Chad Livengood: Well, a lot of it has to do with just the economy of Michigan. I mean, yes, we've regained jobs, and unemployment that is at a 18, 19 year low, but wage growth hasn't kept up, and the cost of living - just yesterday I gave a presentation to the Michigan Association of CPAs, and noted that the cost of living in Metro Detroit from 2017 to 2018 went up 3.2% and wage growth was 2%. So, people are feeling crimped more and more, and so they don't, you know, the reflexive opposition to taxes, and higher taxes, to pay for this type of infrastructure just kind of kicks in, and the other part is we are a state that is essentially stagnant in population, and has been for the better part of three decades, and so when you're not growing and you're not seeing the, kind of, need to lower congestion, you're just basically trying to maintain the roads that you built when you were growing.
That’s where, again, that becomes more and more difficult, and then the other third point, I think, that's just overarching in all discussions in public policy now in Michigan is term limits, and the shorter time span that people spend in the legislature - either six to eight years in the house or eight years in the Senate may be combined for fourteen years – they just have less and less time to get up to speed with the issues, and also sort of master it in the way that we would expect a lawyer to master bankruptcy law if they’re a bankruptcy attorney, or a physician who has a specialty in pediatric care to master that area.
We don't have that same expectation in our society for legislators, and because of that almost as soon as they become pretty up to speed, and understand the facts, and understand the issue, the Constitution sweeps them out of office, or they try to start running for the next office - Senate, or they try to become a county clerk again, or some other position, or they're trying to get appointed as something, and so that just changes the dynamic in Lansing, and it's almost always happening. Almost every six months there’s some kind of movement of the chairs even though term limits, technically, gives you all this time, you know, people are coming and going more frequently it seems.
Jeff Cranson: So, you know, a lot of people agree with you about term limits being one of the biggest policy issues that we have to solve, including the late Senator Glenn Steil Sr. from Grand Rapids who was instrumental in getting that issue on the ballot, and passed, and later said that it was a mistake.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who have, over time, had regret about that, and maybe even increasing heartburn. When you see this kind of big, monumental issue like infrastructure basically linger in the legislature for the better part of a decade, and this is, you know, since 2010 we've been in a recovering and growing economy, and right now we are, you know, seemingly in a booming economy, and we can't seem to quite get an agreement on how to proceed forward with this infrastructure investment issue.
Jeff Cranson: Do you think that's the biggest of all the policy issues that term limits have probably inhibited from progress? Do you think would you rate roads and transportation the biggest?
Chad Livengood: I would, I mean, you know, it took basically a changing of the guard in Lansing to get real, genuine wholesale business tax reform in 2011 with the election of Rick Snyder and the Republicans taking over the entire legislature in the 2010 election, but then they were able to come together, sort of remarkably when you think about it, with passing the Healthy Michigan expanded Medicaid. I mean, the Republican governor was able to convince a more conservative legislature to adopt a portion and enshrine, really, in law for a long time most likely, a piece of Obamacare, and yet they can't crack this nut which is something that affects anybody who leaves their house every day, and has to go to work, or take their kids to school, or just transact business.
Jeff Cranson: -- Everything you do.
Chad Livengood: It affects everything, yeah, and whereas Healthy Michigan, Medicaid, didn't affect everybody - it didn't affect all 10 million people, it provided health insurance to 700,000 low-income residents, and certainly affected the bottom line of hospitals and doctors - but just didn't touch the people even the way - roads touches people more than schools, and that's, like, the next big, kind of, lightning bolt issue that we always seem to be fighting about is education, and funding for education, and standards for education, and reform for education, but roads is even more universal than that.
Jeff Cranson: Well, unfortunately, some public policy long ago in Michigan more or less pitted roads against schools in a funding debate, and that's by assessing a sales tax on fuel that mostly goes to education.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, and that continues to play out in this in this ongoing fight and is one of the really nagging things - when I talk to just average motorists or business owners about roads, they do not like the fact that there is something north of $800 million effectively siphoned off at the pump and sent to schools and cities. Not that they don't support schools and cities, they just think that all taxes paid at the pump ought to be going into the roads because it's sort of the purest form of user tax, and the more you drive, the more gas you use, and so that is a big nut that has someone has to crack at some point. I've been writing about that since three Speakers ago, of the House, since Jase Bolger really framed that issue better than anyone probably has, and his three successors have all continued to carry that torch that there can be no long term road funding deal without ensuring all taxes at the pump go to the roads.
Jeff Cranson: Well, so, I don't remember, in 2010 when I was still with the press and MLive and we did a project called Michigan 10.0, and we looked at a major public policy challenge in each monthly installment, and when we did roads we did a lot of discussion on tolling and found that there wasn't a lot of interest in that in Michigan, and that is an even purer user fee than the gas tax, as you know, and there's a lot of reasons why Michigan abandoned a turnpike commission in the early 50s and decided they were going to do all federal aid for their freeways, and not do tolling – but, if cars are getting more fuel-efficient, which we know they are, and it's kind of a diminishing return, and you've studied this a lot, so what do you think about the future of tolling or vehicle miles traveled as a way to assess people for the roads?
Chad Livengood: Well, that's one of the issues that’s just not really being discussed in all this fight is, okay, our automakers, our bread-and-butter backbone of our economy, are in a space race right now to build electric cars that can go 300 plus miles without a battery charge, and electric cars that'll be run by robots basically, and they're investing heavily - especially GM and Ford - and so, they're doing this with the future in mind, and we're still fighting over gas taxes, and that's why when I see some proposals - just one recently floated about, okay, if we put a sales tax on the ballot we’ll then give people a tax break on their on their vehicle registration fee, the birthday tax, and to me, the vehicle registration fee is the simplest once-a-year tax for users that you that is ensured going forward. If you own a car you’ve got to pay this tax. If you own an electric car you're not paying the same exact gas taxes as your neighbor with the same Ford Escape that guzzles gas, and so that that vehicle registration fee seems like most stable and, actually, if you look at the numbers, it is the one that has continued to grow at or above inflation for years while - and that's partly result of the way that we structured our gas tax in the 1997 increase, there was there was never an inflation factor added to it which, as many people have noted if that had been done in ’97 we probably wouldn't be having this fight because it would have gone up with inflation so that the time value of money continued to go up with the cost of construction.
Jeff Cranson: It would have had to have been a little more than 4 cents but yeah if you had done say 10 to 12 cents and adjusted it for inflation, indexed it, then we wouldn't be having this and that's what a lot of states have done, that's what Pennsylvania did a few years ago when they passed a pretty groundbreaking - a Republican governor worked with his legislature to pass a real wholesale change and yeah, so that's I think that Representative Brixey has been talking about in her town halls, going back to 1951 and Act 51 - if starting then we had just indexed what the fuel tax was then to inflation we wouldn't be - in fact we'd be at 45 cents higher.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, so, these kind of look backs, and if we had done this a half-century ago - they're nice academic measures, but they're not going to fix any damn roads right now.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, they're not changing anybody's mind either. So, tell me this, when you talk about fixing the roads - you talked earlier about Michigan's population staying flat, and that's true. It's bounced back some, but with the booming economy a lot more people are driving now than they were ten years ago at the depths of the Great Recession, and you see it yourself, anecdotally, on the roads that you’re on, I'm sure, and I definitely see it on the roads I'm on.
When people say ‘fix the roads,’ mostly I think they mean, you know, I have a rough road, and I'd like it to see fixed, but I think some of them, they do think that's congestion, I think, let's mitigate my congestion whether it's I-96 around Kent Lake area where MDOT’s talking about another Flex Route similar to on 23, where you use the shoulder just at peak times, which the Federal Highway Administration will allow as long as it's not a permanent lane, things like that. Do you think that sells some people, because when they say ‘fix the roads,’ they mean help my commute, give me capacity?
Chad Livengood: I don't talk to a lot of people about capacity as much as the condition they're driving on, but certainly if you can lower the capacity, you know, the other thing that you'd hear, and this is almost, I think it's bipartisan, is that people want to see truck weights re-examined, and I'll give you an example of one.
One road I went on yesterday - I was trying to get from my house in St. Clair Shores to Livonia, Laurel Manor, a conference center for that CPA conference I was speaking at, and their breakfast - and I was on 696, and Google basically tells me, you know, you’ve got to get off, it's going to get bad west of Mound Road, so I got on Mound Road south into Detroit, South Warren into Detroit, and that Mound Road is wavy as all get-out, and you can't tell me that that was done by vehicles – cars - because that road gets tons of truck traffic.
Now, at the same time, that truck traffic is economically vital. I've written this before; Mound Road is responsible for a very large percentage by itself of the State’s GDP. You've got the Warren truck plant, Ford's got a parts plant, Sterling Stamping for FCA, and then also the road leads down south in Detroit toward the industrial areas of eastside Detroit including General Motors’ Detroit Hamtramck plant. So, it's pretty vital road, but if you're driving that in the morning it is a wavy mess right now, and so people see that, and I think that anger about trucks is definitely real out there.
Jeff Cranson: Oh yeah, I agree, and I didn't understand it as well, you know, the unique science behind per-axle loadings versus total gross weight, and I've come to believe in it. It's just like if you stand your refrigerator upright and concentrate the weight versus laying it down, but at the same time, I think it's a discussion that we should have, and it should be roundly understood and debated, and if it is a matter of making trucks pay higher both fees for permits for their heavy loads, and deciding to change the way that's configured - I mean, we could do a whole podcast on truck weights - but we did come a long way.
The one of two good things about the otherwise very disappointing 2015 roads package was that it achieved diesel parity for the first time, and that does require the trucking industry to pay more. The only other thing I'd say is that whatever we do to make trucks pay more, and the companies that own those trucks, that's going to get passed on to consumers.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, and I get that, I get the science of the axle weights, and I've written about this, but my feedback I see from readers is they don't understand it. I mean, and I'm sitting here right now at the Crain’s headquarters, Crain Communications headquarters, I am watching the flyover ramp over 375 for the northbound traffic going on 75 to Flint, and there is one 11 axle truck carrying either gravel, or they're carrying small pieces of Detroit homes that have been torn down, demolition, or fuel trucks one after another kind of crossing that.
It's hard to explain to people, per-axle weight, for the general public to get that, much less 148 members the legislature who then have to go out and actually communicate that to the people in the public. So, somehow, someone's got to, kind of, figure out how to how to find a compromise with the industry that doesn't put tons and tons of tons of more trucks on the road, but makes it look like - at least symbolically - they're paying a higher share of cost of the roads that they're beating up.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, I think it's something that should be discussed, but I also think that there's no doubt that you've become a complete policy geek if you're now counting axles.
Chad Livengood: Well, when I did that axle story back in February - I was driving home from Lansing back to metro Detroit, and I was trying to think about where we could get a good photo of some trucks, and I was driving by, you know, on I-96 at the Howell exit where they’ve got the discount mall there, the – oh, what do you call it, outlet mall - I'm driving by the outlet mall, and I see there's this wall up against the highway, and it's like, right next to the parking lot of a Burger King, and I'm like hey, I could just sit on that wall and take pictures myself, and so I pulled up, and had dinner, and basically a sunset dinner, waiting for 11 axle trucks to drive by so I could take pictures of them.
Jeff Cranson: It’s too bad you couldn’t have the whole family along.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, well, no, I usually leave them in the car when I do those kinds of things with them, but yeah, sometimes you just see things, and you’ve got to capture the moment.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, so, you're the first reporter, I think, to really kind of zero in on this link between land use and transportation policy, and you wrote back in June, after the Mackinac Policy Conference and an interview with Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey then, about whether we've allowed growth and subdivisions in suburban areas to proliferate, which requires more infrastructure - water lines, sewer lines, and certainly roads - without a sustainable plan to finance them long term, and this came up again as the Senator talked about it on the island this weekend, at the Republican Conference this past weekend, and I just wondered - what kind of feedback are you getting since that's been resurrected, and what are you hearing from people about that?
Chad Livengood: Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure this has quite sunk in with the rest of the policymakers state, but transit advocates clearly get this, the ones who want to have dense, walkable communities, fewer cars left, fewer lanes of I-75 in Oakland County that are going up right now, but this was sort of one of these epiphany moments driving around in the suburbs one day - I was up on 23 to 26 Mile, I had to go up to see a friend up there, and I was driving along, and there was this road widening just down the road from what's still a farm area, but there's also just all sorts of high-density condos going up right across the street from a soybean farm, and I thought to myself, ‘wow, that is some really dense housing for this area, this far out from Detroit,’ and then you see in this one mile stretch of road.
So, I went and looked into it, and they were spending – I can’t think of what the figure was - several millions of dollars to widen this road, Macomb County is, and it just kind of occurred to me ‘whoa, wait a minute, Macomb County has 800 lane miles - and in my column I really emphasized 800 lane miles - that are in poor condition. I mean, you can find these miles on Nine Mile, 10 Mile, 11 Mile, Harper, Little Mack, Schoenherr, Hoover, I mean there’s just - Ryan was just getting rebuilt this summer, and that 11 Mile Service Drive, it did get rebuilt this summer, thankfully, that was an atrocious road, but it just kind of stood out to me. Why are we still widening roads when we can't even afford to pay for the roads that we already have?
From a public policy standpoint, if you're in debt to your bookie, why would you keep placing bets, and so I asked Shirkey about this in this interview, and he agreed that there ought to be some really, really big reexamine of state policy. This is mostly driven by charter townships that do not get Act 51 money, and do not actually own roads, but they are able to legally annex or rezone any farm field to be residential within whatever restrictions the local county has, and then the local county gets dumped with the bill to widen the road, and so then they’ve still got a lot of other infrastructure they’ve got to pay for, and of course the counties are paid for by, under Act 51, they're paid by miles of road, not lane miles, and so their four-lane road gets the same money as a two-lane road in Huron County.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, the dilemma is, as you know, that the township planning commissions think that this is an economic driver. We're creating more property taxpayers, and growth is good, so…
Chad Livengood: Well, that is the prevailing thought for the last half century, but I'm kind of questioning whether we are at a tipping point on that, because you’ve got more and more of these older suburban roads that just cannot be kept up. I mean if Macomb County had - and Oakland County too, they have 500 lane miles - if they had the money to replace that, they would.
I mean, the Oakland County Road Commission replaces or repaves fewer than 75, 80 miles a year and so and we're not even counting all the fair condition roads which, from covering this issue since 2012, I really have started to think that the legislators actually have discounted the fair condition roads as a liability, because since we've been debating this thing in and out for seven years a lot of fair condition roads have switched to poor condition roads. I dug up a chart, mostly so I could sort of make a point, I had a little Twitter spat with state senator Eric Nesbitt from Huron County…
Jeff Cranson: Oh, I remember.
Chad Livengood: …And he - who served six of these years in in the House - and now he's a state senator, and I looked up Van Buren county’s pacer road condition report, and in 2003 1.5% of the county's local roads - not the state ones, just the local ones – 1.5% were in poor condition. In 2017 47.5% were in poor condition. I mean, talk about a major swing.
I thought it was so instructive of what has been the side effect of this, that we had the gas tax increase in ’97, it was a big bonding effort by the State. In the subsequent years it repaved a lot of roads, made things look really nice early 2000s, and then the bills came for the bond debt, the payments started, the actual outlays per capita really declined, and we just let everything kind of go to rot.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, that's right, and I understand when you talk about transit advocates, and multimodal advocates, and basically urbanists - people that want to live in a in a dense place, and think that's better for them and the environment - and I also understand the dilemma, because when you raise this issue, and you focus on those subdivisions and those county roads that were added or expanded to accommodate those, then the Urbanists bring up the I-75 project in Oakland County that you mentioned a while ago, and I feel like I understand both sides of that debate.
I understand why a lot of people, a lot of commuters, and a lot of people hauling commerce wanted more capacity there. Heavily congested, as you know, especially now during the work, and every time this comes up people it's induced demand right? You add capacity and then more people drive on it, and it's bad for the environment, sitting still in traffic, and idling and congestion is bad for the environment too, and a lot of people consider themselves pretty environmentally conscious, and yet they commute half an hour or 45 minutes every day.
I kind of feel like everybody looks in the mirror and sees an environmentalist, we all make our choices about what we do. How would you try to balance that, and I mean, should the freeways never have been built? I mean when Al Gore Sr., you know, the senator from Tennessee, Al Gore Jr.’s father, the Democratic senator who carried the water for the interstate system and worked with Eisenhower for that, he didn't foresee what it was going to do in terms of sprawl, and what it was going to do to how we live, and you know, where we decide to leave a city, and all those things that go with that, so how do you put that genie back in the bottle?
Chad Livengood: I mean, you really can't for metro Detroit, but you’ve got to start thinking about adaptive long-term living, and what I'm kind of trying to raise the point with these short-term legislators, policy makers, is that their decisions now will have implications for decades, and so if they don't crack this nut on how to fund the current infrastructure, how are we going to build more infrastructure?
I mean, just several months ago, back in the wintertime, I was at a Business Leaders from Michigan forum up in Lansing - you might have been there too - and Albert Berriz who is the CEO of McKinley & Associates, the real estate development management company out of Ann Arbor that Ron Weiser, former Republican Party chairman, founded and made his wealth off of which has been transferred to Republican politics for the last quarter century.
Jeff Cranson: Right.
Chad Livengood: Albert said ‘look, there are there are markets in Michigan we're just not going to go to anymore. Big apartment complex builders, and development, and managers that we're not going there anymore because the infrastructure can't support it.
Jeff Cranson: Well wasn’t most of his presentation the one that focused on Florida and their investment and what they're doing?
Chad Livengood: Yes, yeah, and he said ‘that's why we're moving south.’ I mean without saying it explicitly, he basically said ‘we're taking Ron Weiser's money, and we're going to Florida, and we're going to South Carolina, and we're going to Georgia,’ and not just because of the weather, but because there's actually more strategic plans in place long-term for funding infrastructure that supports economic development.
Jeff Cranson: Oh yeah, Florida spend a heck of a lot more on roads than Michigan does.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, and he didn't have to say it, but he was basically pointing at places like Macomb County, and Livingston County, and maybe even Ottawa that can't support larger and larger developments now, because there just simply is not new money available to support that additional infrastructure, so I mean, as far as your first question about what do we do about all these highways we built - I can't undo that, no one can, so we have to figure out how to make it work long term, and clearly right now, when you’ve got 45 percent of the roads in Metro Detroit rated in poor condition, and it's only going to get worse in the next 10 years, it's clearly not working.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, I just, it's so difficult, because if you're going to have to rebuild a major freeway like that segment on I-75 in Oakland County, and you know now things that you didn't know 50 or 60 years ago in terms of safety, and in terms of how congestion relates to crashes, you know, would you be remiss if you didn't include some expansion, and I think that was the prevailing argument, you know?
Chad Livengood: Well, maybe this is where the vehicle miles tax someday comes into play. That will actually be a public policy that will encourage people to live close to where they work and not drive as much, I mean, but…
Jeff Cranson: Or pay a premium if you do.
Chad Livengood: Yes. It depends on how you set that, and how you - and also, it's going to greatly depend on the technology, and getting it into vehicles, which it just seems like that's a 20-25 year proposition, to try to transition to something like that, almost might – maybe we start as a state with autonomous vehicles, okay, we're going to put autonomous vehicle fleets on the roads, and Ford has said they're going to do it by 2021, and GM is trying to race to do the same thing, and Google is going to be building autonomous vehicles right here in Detroit at an old American Axle plant. Maybe we start with those vehicles, and tax their miles, and see where that goes.
Jeff Cranson: I think that probably is a good policy discussion to have too, and we should definitely talk about autonomous and automated vehicles at some point, because it's happening gradually. If you ask people now if they want to give up the wheel the vast majority would say no, they think everybody else is a terrible driver, but I'm a good driver, and they don't want to give up the wheel, but gradually things are being added that are going to be mandatory in just a couple years like lane assist, and adaptive cruise control, and auto braking, and rear assist, and that's why I think crashes and fatalities are actually going down despite more people driving.
I think the technology is already saving lives, and it's just going to happen over time, and our cars are going to become more and more equipped, and we're going to think ‘I guess this is a good thing, after all,’ so, but, let's talk a little bit, since we talked about transit and what that means in terms of sprawl, about the RTA, because you had an excellent story that posted Sunday with a lot of voices. The most comprehensive look, I think, anybody's done in quite some time about the whole decision to have a Regional Transit Authority, something that was talked about for, gosh, nearly 50 years, and the legislature created the law in 2012, and they took a crack at a millage in 2016 for the counties around metro Detroit, didn't get it over the finish line - arguably because it was the same year that Donald Trump was on the ballot, and a lot of voters in Macomb County voted against it – so, you talked to a lot of people that said maybe Macomb County isn't part of the next one, and we do it without them, so what do you think the prospects are for that?
Chad Livengood: Yeah, I mean, this has become kind of this regional issue that we can't solve - although we've had regional issues like this we couldn't solve before like Water Authority, which ultimately came about in Detroit's bankruptcy by spending out the water department into a Regional Authority. Now we've got this Transit Authority that was passed - basically, Brooks Patterson, the late Brooks Patterson, Oakland County Executive, wrote the law in 2012 that he and then-Detroit Mayor Dave Bing worked to get passed.
For some people, a little bit of history, there was an RTA bill that passed the legislature in the lame-duck session of 2002 that John Engler, the former governor, famously vetoed on his last hour or two in office on the first day of January in 2003 – and he vetoed it because he was upset with the school board of Detroit, so he vetoed the Regional Transit Authority bill that then Brooks Patterson also had sought. So, we've had this long fight that, you know, there was that was that setback, and then it took a decade to get the bill passed again, and here we are seven years later, and the RTA is nothing more than a been a Regional Board with a couple of staffers, it doesn't actually have any kind of money or power, you know, because they struck out on their on their first millage attempt, and then they couldn't get the votes, because of the way it was structured, they couldn't get the votes to get on the ballot last year, and because under this law you have to have one voting member from all the four counties of Washtenaw, Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb, and one member of Detroit to vote to put something on the ballot, and it's one of these super majorities that was devised that also applied to the zoo, and the Water Authority, and the Cobo Center Convention Authority, TCF Center as now it’s called, and so we've got this system set up, but we don't have quite the political will from all four corners to do this.
Macomb County has basically said, and it sort of dovetails with our earlier conversation, Mark Hackel says ‘look, I've got 800 lane miles of roads in bad condition. My voters will want me to fix the roads first here before we actually add any more buses to them, and so that's our priority.’ He's also trying to get a bond issue passed to build a new jail, and he needs that almost a mill, 1 mill of property tax increase to fund this $300 million jail, and so he's just got different priorities, and so this fight continues. I, honestly, I'm skeptical that anything is on the ballot, but they're looking at ways to, maybe, just split off from Macomb and do county-by-county millages for transit that would be separate and above the existing millages that taxpayers in certain communities of Oakland and Wayne County pay into the Smart suburban transit bus system already, so…
Jeff Cranson: Well and when you think about the Amazons in the world, and the modern workforce, and what younger workers want, and what other cities have, and then you have a mayor that you quoted, you know, from a part of Oakland County that wouldn't be as supportive of an RTA saying ‘if you're flying in to Detroit because you want to get out here, you don't jump on the blue line, and then the green line, and then you're here. It's an uber or private transportation.’ I don't know what that means when we're competing with places like even Cleveland where you can get on a train from the airport and get downtown.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of smaller towns that you can get on a train right from the airport and get downtown within an hour, and that doesn't exist - I mean, we do have, now, a bus that runs out to the metro Detroit airport from downtown but it's on one of Smart’s fast lines, it's - I rode it one day out to the airport and back just to see how it works - you know, it's faster than other routes, but it takes an hour, and by car you can do that in 30-35 minutes, 40-45 minutes in bad traffic, so people's expectation in order to use this is that there's going to be comparable or reasonably close to the time it takes to jump in an Uber, and until we get to that kind of level of service, you're just not going to get as much buy in. I mean, I just recently noted that out in Grand Rapids there's talks right now about the rapid running bus service from Grand Rapids to Holland, and we don't even have consistent service here from Detroit to Ann Arbor. It's not the same exact distance, Ann Arbor's a little longer than Grand Rapids to Holland, but it's a very similar type of sister-city metropolitan area.
Jeff Cranson: Oh yeah, I mean Grand Rapids is about to launch its second bus rapid transit line, and there aren't any other in the state yet, so yeah.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, we do not have one yet. I mean they went big in that 2016 election, I wasn't covering it because I was knee deep in the presidential election and the Flint water crisis that year, but I could tell in their last couple of weeks, especially spending most of that time in Oakland and Macomb counties where, you know, ground zero of presidential elections, that the messaging was not all that robust, and that if you were just your average voter you would not understand what was in it for you.
So, if they're going to do it again, they’ve got to really, actually have a real message, and you've got to have your regional leaders actually all on board. You might recall that that one almost didn't even make it to the ballot in the early summer of 2016. It was pretty much as close to shotgun marriage as it gets, and Brooks Patterson didn't go out and campaign for it, and Mark Hackel didn't go out and campaign for it. They just, kind of, barely allowed it on the ballot…
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, I do remember. Well, I think we better wrap it up, there's so much more we could talk about. I think this has been fascinating, and I appreciate your time, Chad, and I hope that I can have you on again as this continues because I promised that I would have people both inside the department, outside the department and just about anybody that has any insight on all issues of mobility, so thanks for doing this.
Chad Livengood: Well, I appreciate it, I'm happy to do it, and I said at the outset that I'll always be writing about roads.
Narrator: That's a wrap for this edition of Talking Michigan Transportation. Check out show notes and more on Soundcloud, or by subscribing on Apple podcast.
[Music]
Narrator: It's time for Talking Michigan Transportation, a podcast devoted to the conversations with people at the forefront of the ongoing mobility revolution. In the state that put the world on wheels, here's your host, MDOT Communications Director Jeff Cranson.
Jeff Cranson: Welcome to the Talking Michigan Transportation podcast, this is Jeff Cranson. I am the Communications Director at the Michigan Department of Transportation. This is my weekly conversation with people that really have anything insightful to say about mobility - some inside the department, some outside - and this week I'm talking with Chad Livengood who is a senior editor at Crain's Detroit Business, and has been writing about transportation and road issues for some time, so thanks for coming on, Chad.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, thanks Jeff. When I moved back to Michigan in February of 2012 I had been out of state for four years as a political reporter in Delaware and Missouri, split time covering those two legislatures, and when I came back and joined the Detroit News and was in the Lansing bureau, Gary Heinlein - long time Lansing bureau reporter for the news, now retired - one of his first, sort of, insightful comments to me was ‘we’ll never write enough about the roads.’
Chad Livengood: He was like ‘the legislature will do something, we’ll write about it, and then the roads will get worse again, and we’ll start writing about it.’ It's a perpetual story, and it's good for maintaining long employment in the news business.
Jeff Cranson: You know, it's funny you say that, because when I was the political editor at the Grand Rapids Press and working with Peter Luke - who was our Lansing bureau reporter and he was a veteran just like Gary - and he said the same thing. So, that was pretty well understood in the Capitol press corps, I guess, in those days.
Chad Livengood: Peter did that, wrote about roads for 25-30 years, and it just never seems to go away as an issue.
Jeff Cranson: So, talk about why you think that is. Why is it so difficult in Michigan - and I don't want to make it sound like Michigan's the only state that's had a problem with this, there are other states that have been trying to do various things and having a tough time - but a lot of our neighbors in recent years have passed increases. Pennsylvania obviously passed one of the biggest in the in the country, and has really, kind of, righted the ship in terms of repairing their bridges and roads. Ohio, which already had a higher fuel tax than Michigan, added another ten cents recently. Why do you think this is so difficult here?
Chad Livengood: Well, a lot of it has to do with just the economy of Michigan. I mean, yes, we've regained jobs, and unemployment that is at a 18, 19 year low, but wage growth hasn't kept up, and the cost of living - just yesterday I gave a presentation to the Michigan Association of CPAs, and noted that the cost of living in Metro Detroit from 2017 to 2018 went up 3.2% and wage growth was 2%. So, people are feeling crimped more and more, and so they don't, you know, the reflexive opposition to taxes, and higher taxes, to pay for this type of infrastructure just kind of kicks in, and the other part is we are a state that is essentially stagnant in population, and has been for the better part of three decades, and so when you're not growing and you're not seeing the, kind of, need to lower congestion, you're just basically trying to maintain the roads that you built when you were growing.
That’s where, again, that becomes more and more difficult, and then the other third point, I think, that's just overarching in all discussions in public policy now in Michigan is term limits, and the shorter time span that people spend in the legislature - either six to eight years in the house or eight years in the Senate may be combined for fourteen years – they just have less and less time to get up to speed with the issues, and also sort of master it in the way that we would expect a lawyer to master bankruptcy law if they’re a bankruptcy attorney, or a physician who has a specialty in pediatric care to master that area.
We don't have that same expectation in our society for legislators, and because of that almost as soon as they become pretty up to speed, and understand the facts, and understand the issue, the Constitution sweeps them out of office, or they try to start running for the next office - Senate, or they try to become a county clerk again, or some other position, or they're trying to get appointed as something, and so that just changes the dynamic in Lansing, and it's almost always happening. Almost every six months there’s some kind of movement of the chairs even though term limits, technically, gives you all this time, you know, people are coming and going more frequently it seems.
Jeff Cranson: So, you know, a lot of people agree with you about term limits being one of the biggest policy issues that we have to solve, including the late Senator Glenn Steil Sr. from Grand Rapids who was instrumental in getting that issue on the ballot, and passed, and later said that it was a mistake.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who have, over time, had regret about that, and maybe even increasing heartburn. When you see this kind of big, monumental issue like infrastructure basically linger in the legislature for the better part of a decade, and this is, you know, since 2010 we've been in a recovering and growing economy, and right now we are, you know, seemingly in a booming economy, and we can't seem to quite get an agreement on how to proceed forward with this infrastructure investment issue.
Jeff Cranson: Do you think that's the biggest of all the policy issues that term limits have probably inhibited from progress? Do you think would you rate roads and transportation the biggest?
Chad Livengood: I would, I mean, you know, it took basically a changing of the guard in Lansing to get real, genuine wholesale business tax reform in 2011 with the election of Rick Snyder and the Republicans taking over the entire legislature in the 2010 election, but then they were able to come together, sort of remarkably when you think about it, with passing the Healthy Michigan expanded Medicaid. I mean, the Republican governor was able to convince a more conservative legislature to adopt a portion and enshrine, really, in law for a long time most likely, a piece of Obamacare, and yet they can't crack this nut which is something that affects anybody who leaves their house every day, and has to go to work, or take their kids to school, or just transact business.
Jeff Cranson: -- Everything you do.
Chad Livengood: It affects everything, yeah, and whereas Healthy Michigan, Medicaid, didn't affect everybody - it didn't affect all 10 million people, it provided health insurance to 700,000 low-income residents, and certainly affected the bottom line of hospitals and doctors - but just didn't touch the people even the way - roads touches people more than schools, and that's, like, the next big, kind of, lightning bolt issue that we always seem to be fighting about is education, and funding for education, and standards for education, and reform for education, but roads is even more universal than that.
Jeff Cranson: Well, unfortunately, some public policy long ago in Michigan more or less pitted roads against schools in a funding debate, and that's by assessing a sales tax on fuel that mostly goes to education.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, and that continues to play out in this in this ongoing fight and is one of the really nagging things - when I talk to just average motorists or business owners about roads, they do not like the fact that there is something north of $800 million effectively siphoned off at the pump and sent to schools and cities. Not that they don't support schools and cities, they just think that all taxes paid at the pump ought to be going into the roads because it's sort of the purest form of user tax, and the more you drive, the more gas you use, and so that is a big nut that has someone has to crack at some point. I've been writing about that since three Speakers ago, of the House, since Jase Bolger really framed that issue better than anyone probably has, and his three successors have all continued to carry that torch that there can be no long term road funding deal without ensuring all taxes at the pump go to the roads.
Jeff Cranson: Well, so, I don't remember, in 2010 when I was still with the press and MLive and we did a project called Michigan 10.0, and we looked at a major public policy challenge in each monthly installment, and when we did roads we did a lot of discussion on tolling and found that there wasn't a lot of interest in that in Michigan, and that is an even purer user fee than the gas tax, as you know, and there's a lot of reasons why Michigan abandoned a turnpike commission in the early 50s and decided they were going to do all federal aid for their freeways, and not do tolling – but, if cars are getting more fuel-efficient, which we know they are, and it's kind of a diminishing return, and you've studied this a lot, so what do you think about the future of tolling or vehicle miles traveled as a way to assess people for the roads?
Chad Livengood: Well, that's one of the issues that’s just not really being discussed in all this fight is, okay, our automakers, our bread-and-butter backbone of our economy, are in a space race right now to build electric cars that can go 300 plus miles without a battery charge, and electric cars that'll be run by robots basically, and they're investing heavily - especially GM and Ford - and so, they're doing this with the future in mind, and we're still fighting over gas taxes, and that's why when I see some proposals - just one recently floated about, okay, if we put a sales tax on the ballot we’ll then give people a tax break on their on their vehicle registration fee, the birthday tax, and to me, the vehicle registration fee is the simplest once-a-year tax for users that you that is ensured going forward. If you own a car you’ve got to pay this tax. If you own an electric car you're not paying the same exact gas taxes as your neighbor with the same Ford Escape that guzzles gas, and so that that vehicle registration fee seems like most stable and, actually, if you look at the numbers, it is the one that has continued to grow at or above inflation for years while - and that's partly result of the way that we structured our gas tax in the 1997 increase, there was there was never an inflation factor added to it which, as many people have noted if that had been done in ’97 we probably wouldn't be having this fight because it would have gone up with inflation so that the time value of money continued to go up with the cost of construction.
Jeff Cranson: It would have had to have been a little more than 4 cents but yeah if you had done say 10 to 12 cents and adjusted it for inflation, indexed it, then we wouldn't be having this and that's what a lot of states have done, that's what Pennsylvania did a few years ago when they passed a pretty groundbreaking - a Republican governor worked with his legislature to pass a real wholesale change and yeah, so that's I think that Representative Brixey has been talking about in her town halls, going back to 1951 and Act 51 - if starting then we had just indexed what the fuel tax was then to inflation we wouldn't be - in fact we'd be at 45 cents higher.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, so, these kind of look backs, and if we had done this a half-century ago - they're nice academic measures, but they're not going to fix any damn roads right now.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, they're not changing anybody's mind either. So, tell me this, when you talk about fixing the roads - you talked earlier about Michigan's population staying flat, and that's true. It's bounced back some, but with the booming economy a lot more people are driving now than they were ten years ago at the depths of the Great Recession, and you see it yourself, anecdotally, on the roads that you’re on, I'm sure, and I definitely see it on the roads I'm on.
When people say ‘fix the roads,’ mostly I think they mean, you know, I have a rough road, and I'd like it to see fixed, but I think some of them, they do think that's congestion, I think, let's mitigate my congestion whether it's I-96 around Kent Lake area where MDOT’s talking about another Flex Route similar to on 23, where you use the shoulder just at peak times, which the Federal Highway Administration will allow as long as it's not a permanent lane, things like that. Do you think that sells some people, because when they say ‘fix the roads,’ they mean help my commute, give me capacity?
Chad Livengood: I don't talk to a lot of people about capacity as much as the condition they're driving on, but certainly if you can lower the capacity, you know, the other thing that you'd hear, and this is almost, I think it's bipartisan, is that people want to see truck weights re-examined, and I'll give you an example of one.
One road I went on yesterday - I was trying to get from my house in St. Clair Shores to Livonia, Laurel Manor, a conference center for that CPA conference I was speaking at, and their breakfast - and I was on 696, and Google basically tells me, you know, you’ve got to get off, it's going to get bad west of Mound Road, so I got on Mound Road south into Detroit, South Warren into Detroit, and that Mound Road is wavy as all get-out, and you can't tell me that that was done by vehicles – cars - because that road gets tons of truck traffic.
Now, at the same time, that truck traffic is economically vital. I've written this before; Mound Road is responsible for a very large percentage by itself of the State’s GDP. You've got the Warren truck plant, Ford's got a parts plant, Sterling Stamping for FCA, and then also the road leads down south in Detroit toward the industrial areas of eastside Detroit including General Motors’ Detroit Hamtramck plant. So, it's pretty vital road, but if you're driving that in the morning it is a wavy mess right now, and so people see that, and I think that anger about trucks is definitely real out there.
Jeff Cranson: Oh yeah, I agree, and I didn't understand it as well, you know, the unique science behind per-axle loadings versus total gross weight, and I've come to believe in it. It's just like if you stand your refrigerator upright and concentrate the weight versus laying it down, but at the same time, I think it's a discussion that we should have, and it should be roundly understood and debated, and if it is a matter of making trucks pay higher both fees for permits for their heavy loads, and deciding to change the way that's configured - I mean, we could do a whole podcast on truck weights - but we did come a long way.
The one of two good things about the otherwise very disappointing 2015 roads package was that it achieved diesel parity for the first time, and that does require the trucking industry to pay more. The only other thing I'd say is that whatever we do to make trucks pay more, and the companies that own those trucks, that's going to get passed on to consumers.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, and I get that, I get the science of the axle weights, and I've written about this, but my feedback I see from readers is they don't understand it. I mean, and I'm sitting here right now at the Crain’s headquarters, Crain Communications headquarters, I am watching the flyover ramp over 375 for the northbound traffic going on 75 to Flint, and there is one 11 axle truck carrying either gravel, or they're carrying small pieces of Detroit homes that have been torn down, demolition, or fuel trucks one after another kind of crossing that.
It's hard to explain to people, per-axle weight, for the general public to get that, much less 148 members the legislature who then have to go out and actually communicate that to the people in the public. So, somehow, someone's got to, kind of, figure out how to how to find a compromise with the industry that doesn't put tons and tons of tons of more trucks on the road, but makes it look like - at least symbolically - they're paying a higher share of cost of the roads that they're beating up.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, I think it's something that should be discussed, but I also think that there's no doubt that you've become a complete policy geek if you're now counting axles.
Chad Livengood: Well, when I did that axle story back in February - I was driving home from Lansing back to metro Detroit, and I was trying to think about where we could get a good photo of some trucks, and I was driving by, you know, on I-96 at the Howell exit where they’ve got the discount mall there, the – oh, what do you call it, outlet mall - I'm driving by the outlet mall, and I see there's this wall up against the highway, and it's like, right next to the parking lot of a Burger King, and I'm like hey, I could just sit on that wall and take pictures myself, and so I pulled up, and had dinner, and basically a sunset dinner, waiting for 11 axle trucks to drive by so I could take pictures of them.
Jeff Cranson: It’s too bad you couldn’t have the whole family along.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, well, no, I usually leave them in the car when I do those kinds of things with them, but yeah, sometimes you just see things, and you’ve got to capture the moment.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, so, you're the first reporter, I think, to really kind of zero in on this link between land use and transportation policy, and you wrote back in June, after the Mackinac Policy Conference and an interview with Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey then, about whether we've allowed growth and subdivisions in suburban areas to proliferate, which requires more infrastructure - water lines, sewer lines, and certainly roads - without a sustainable plan to finance them long term, and this came up again as the Senator talked about it on the island this weekend, at the Republican Conference this past weekend, and I just wondered - what kind of feedback are you getting since that's been resurrected, and what are you hearing from people about that?
Chad Livengood: Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure this has quite sunk in with the rest of the policymakers state, but transit advocates clearly get this, the ones who want to have dense, walkable communities, fewer cars left, fewer lanes of I-75 in Oakland County that are going up right now, but this was sort of one of these epiphany moments driving around in the suburbs one day - I was up on 23 to 26 Mile, I had to go up to see a friend up there, and I was driving along, and there was this road widening just down the road from what's still a farm area, but there's also just all sorts of high-density condos going up right across the street from a soybean farm, and I thought to myself, ‘wow, that is some really dense housing for this area, this far out from Detroit,’ and then you see in this one mile stretch of road.
So, I went and looked into it, and they were spending – I can’t think of what the figure was - several millions of dollars to widen this road, Macomb County is, and it just kind of occurred to me ‘whoa, wait a minute, Macomb County has 800 lane miles - and in my column I really emphasized 800 lane miles - that are in poor condition. I mean, you can find these miles on Nine Mile, 10 Mile, 11 Mile, Harper, Little Mack, Schoenherr, Hoover, I mean there’s just - Ryan was just getting rebuilt this summer, and that 11 Mile Service Drive, it did get rebuilt this summer, thankfully, that was an atrocious road, but it just kind of stood out to me. Why are we still widening roads when we can't even afford to pay for the roads that we already have?
From a public policy standpoint, if you're in debt to your bookie, why would you keep placing bets, and so I asked Shirkey about this in this interview, and he agreed that there ought to be some really, really big reexamine of state policy. This is mostly driven by charter townships that do not get Act 51 money, and do not actually own roads, but they are able to legally annex or rezone any farm field to be residential within whatever restrictions the local county has, and then the local county gets dumped with the bill to widen the road, and so then they’ve still got a lot of other infrastructure they’ve got to pay for, and of course the counties are paid for by, under Act 51, they're paid by miles of road, not lane miles, and so their four-lane road gets the same money as a two-lane road in Huron County.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, the dilemma is, as you know, that the township planning commissions think that this is an economic driver. We're creating more property taxpayers, and growth is good, so…
Chad Livengood: Well, that is the prevailing thought for the last half century, but I'm kind of questioning whether we are at a tipping point on that, because you’ve got more and more of these older suburban roads that just cannot be kept up. I mean if Macomb County had - and Oakland County too, they have 500 lane miles - if they had the money to replace that, they would.
I mean, the Oakland County Road Commission replaces or repaves fewer than 75, 80 miles a year and so and we're not even counting all the fair condition roads which, from covering this issue since 2012, I really have started to think that the legislators actually have discounted the fair condition roads as a liability, because since we've been debating this thing in and out for seven years a lot of fair condition roads have switched to poor condition roads. I dug up a chart, mostly so I could sort of make a point, I had a little Twitter spat with state senator Eric Nesbitt from Huron County…
Jeff Cranson: Oh, I remember.
Chad Livengood: …And he - who served six of these years in in the House - and now he's a state senator, and I looked up Van Buren county’s pacer road condition report, and in 2003 1.5% of the county's local roads - not the state ones, just the local ones – 1.5% were in poor condition. In 2017 47.5% were in poor condition. I mean, talk about a major swing.
I thought it was so instructive of what has been the side effect of this, that we had the gas tax increase in ’97, it was a big bonding effort by the State. In the subsequent years it repaved a lot of roads, made things look really nice early 2000s, and then the bills came for the bond debt, the payments started, the actual outlays per capita really declined, and we just let everything kind of go to rot.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, that's right, and I understand when you talk about transit advocates, and multimodal advocates, and basically urbanists - people that want to live in a in a dense place, and think that's better for them and the environment - and I also understand the dilemma, because when you raise this issue, and you focus on those subdivisions and those county roads that were added or expanded to accommodate those, then the Urbanists bring up the I-75 project in Oakland County that you mentioned a while ago, and I feel like I understand both sides of that debate.
I understand why a lot of people, a lot of commuters, and a lot of people hauling commerce wanted more capacity there. Heavily congested, as you know, especially now during the work, and every time this comes up people it's induced demand right? You add capacity and then more people drive on it, and it's bad for the environment, sitting still in traffic, and idling and congestion is bad for the environment too, and a lot of people consider themselves pretty environmentally conscious, and yet they commute half an hour or 45 minutes every day.
I kind of feel like everybody looks in the mirror and sees an environmentalist, we all make our choices about what we do. How would you try to balance that, and I mean, should the freeways never have been built? I mean when Al Gore Sr., you know, the senator from Tennessee, Al Gore Jr.’s father, the Democratic senator who carried the water for the interstate system and worked with Eisenhower for that, he didn't foresee what it was going to do in terms of sprawl, and what it was going to do to how we live, and you know, where we decide to leave a city, and all those things that go with that, so how do you put that genie back in the bottle?
Chad Livengood: I mean, you really can't for metro Detroit, but you’ve got to start thinking about adaptive long-term living, and what I'm kind of trying to raise the point with these short-term legislators, policy makers, is that their decisions now will have implications for decades, and so if they don't crack this nut on how to fund the current infrastructure, how are we going to build more infrastructure?
I mean, just several months ago, back in the wintertime, I was at a Business Leaders from Michigan forum up in Lansing - you might have been there too - and Albert Berriz who is the CEO of McKinley & Associates, the real estate development management company out of Ann Arbor that Ron Weiser, former Republican Party chairman, founded and made his wealth off of which has been transferred to Republican politics for the last quarter century.
Jeff Cranson: Right.
Chad Livengood: Albert said ‘look, there are there are markets in Michigan we're just not going to go to anymore. Big apartment complex builders, and development, and managers that we're not going there anymore because the infrastructure can't support it.
Jeff Cranson: Well wasn’t most of his presentation the one that focused on Florida and their investment and what they're doing?
Chad Livengood: Yes, yeah, and he said ‘that's why we're moving south.’ I mean without saying it explicitly, he basically said ‘we're taking Ron Weiser's money, and we're going to Florida, and we're going to South Carolina, and we're going to Georgia,’ and not just because of the weather, but because there's actually more strategic plans in place long-term for funding infrastructure that supports economic development.
Jeff Cranson: Oh yeah, Florida spend a heck of a lot more on roads than Michigan does.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, and he didn't have to say it, but he was basically pointing at places like Macomb County, and Livingston County, and maybe even Ottawa that can't support larger and larger developments now, because there just simply is not new money available to support that additional infrastructure, so I mean, as far as your first question about what do we do about all these highways we built - I can't undo that, no one can, so we have to figure out how to make it work long term, and clearly right now, when you’ve got 45 percent of the roads in Metro Detroit rated in poor condition, and it's only going to get worse in the next 10 years, it's clearly not working.
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, I just, it's so difficult, because if you're going to have to rebuild a major freeway like that segment on I-75 in Oakland County, and you know now things that you didn't know 50 or 60 years ago in terms of safety, and in terms of how congestion relates to crashes, you know, would you be remiss if you didn't include some expansion, and I think that was the prevailing argument, you know?
Chad Livengood: Well, maybe this is where the vehicle miles tax someday comes into play. That will actually be a public policy that will encourage people to live close to where they work and not drive as much, I mean, but…
Jeff Cranson: Or pay a premium if you do.
Chad Livengood: Yes. It depends on how you set that, and how you - and also, it's going to greatly depend on the technology, and getting it into vehicles, which it just seems like that's a 20-25 year proposition, to try to transition to something like that, almost might – maybe we start as a state with autonomous vehicles, okay, we're going to put autonomous vehicle fleets on the roads, and Ford has said they're going to do it by 2021, and GM is trying to race to do the same thing, and Google is going to be building autonomous vehicles right here in Detroit at an old American Axle plant. Maybe we start with those vehicles, and tax their miles, and see where that goes.
Jeff Cranson: I think that probably is a good policy discussion to have too, and we should definitely talk about autonomous and automated vehicles at some point, because it's happening gradually. If you ask people now if they want to give up the wheel the vast majority would say no, they think everybody else is a terrible driver, but I'm a good driver, and they don't want to give up the wheel, but gradually things are being added that are going to be mandatory in just a couple years like lane assist, and adaptive cruise control, and auto braking, and rear assist, and that's why I think crashes and fatalities are actually going down despite more people driving.
I think the technology is already saving lives, and it's just going to happen over time, and our cars are going to become more and more equipped, and we're going to think ‘I guess this is a good thing, after all,’ so, but, let's talk a little bit, since we talked about transit and what that means in terms of sprawl, about the RTA, because you had an excellent story that posted Sunday with a lot of voices. The most comprehensive look, I think, anybody's done in quite some time about the whole decision to have a Regional Transit Authority, something that was talked about for, gosh, nearly 50 years, and the legislature created the law in 2012, and they took a crack at a millage in 2016 for the counties around metro Detroit, didn't get it over the finish line - arguably because it was the same year that Donald Trump was on the ballot, and a lot of voters in Macomb County voted against it – so, you talked to a lot of people that said maybe Macomb County isn't part of the next one, and we do it without them, so what do you think the prospects are for that?
Chad Livengood: Yeah, I mean, this has become kind of this regional issue that we can't solve - although we've had regional issues like this we couldn't solve before like Water Authority, which ultimately came about in Detroit's bankruptcy by spending out the water department into a Regional Authority. Now we've got this Transit Authority that was passed - basically, Brooks Patterson, the late Brooks Patterson, Oakland County Executive, wrote the law in 2012 that he and then-Detroit Mayor Dave Bing worked to get passed.
For some people, a little bit of history, there was an RTA bill that passed the legislature in the lame-duck session of 2002 that John Engler, the former governor, famously vetoed on his last hour or two in office on the first day of January in 2003 – and he vetoed it because he was upset with the school board of Detroit, so he vetoed the Regional Transit Authority bill that then Brooks Patterson also had sought. So, we've had this long fight that, you know, there was that was that setback, and then it took a decade to get the bill passed again, and here we are seven years later, and the RTA is nothing more than a been a Regional Board with a couple of staffers, it doesn't actually have any kind of money or power, you know, because they struck out on their on their first millage attempt, and then they couldn't get the votes, because of the way it was structured, they couldn't get the votes to get on the ballot last year, and because under this law you have to have one voting member from all the four counties of Washtenaw, Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb, and one member of Detroit to vote to put something on the ballot, and it's one of these super majorities that was devised that also applied to the zoo, and the Water Authority, and the Cobo Center Convention Authority, TCF Center as now it’s called, and so we've got this system set up, but we don't have quite the political will from all four corners to do this.
Macomb County has basically said, and it sort of dovetails with our earlier conversation, Mark Hackel says ‘look, I've got 800 lane miles of roads in bad condition. My voters will want me to fix the roads first here before we actually add any more buses to them, and so that's our priority.’ He's also trying to get a bond issue passed to build a new jail, and he needs that almost a mill, 1 mill of property tax increase to fund this $300 million jail, and so he's just got different priorities, and so this fight continues. I, honestly, I'm skeptical that anything is on the ballot, but they're looking at ways to, maybe, just split off from Macomb and do county-by-county millages for transit that would be separate and above the existing millages that taxpayers in certain communities of Oakland and Wayne County pay into the Smart suburban transit bus system already, so…
Jeff Cranson: Well and when you think about the Amazons in the world, and the modern workforce, and what younger workers want, and what other cities have, and then you have a mayor that you quoted, you know, from a part of Oakland County that wouldn't be as supportive of an RTA saying ‘if you're flying in to Detroit because you want to get out here, you don't jump on the blue line, and then the green line, and then you're here. It's an uber or private transportation.’ I don't know what that means when we're competing with places like even Cleveland where you can get on a train from the airport and get downtown.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of smaller towns that you can get on a train right from the airport and get downtown within an hour, and that doesn't exist - I mean, we do have, now, a bus that runs out to the metro Detroit airport from downtown but it's on one of Smart’s fast lines, it's - I rode it one day out to the airport and back just to see how it works - you know, it's faster than other routes, but it takes an hour, and by car you can do that in 30-35 minutes, 40-45 minutes in bad traffic, so people's expectation in order to use this is that there's going to be comparable or reasonably close to the time it takes to jump in an Uber, and until we get to that kind of level of service, you're just not going to get as much buy in. I mean, I just recently noted that out in Grand Rapids there's talks right now about the rapid running bus service from Grand Rapids to Holland, and we don't even have consistent service here from Detroit to Ann Arbor. It's not the same exact distance, Ann Arbor's a little longer than Grand Rapids to Holland, but it's a very similar type of sister-city metropolitan area.
Jeff Cranson: Oh yeah, I mean Grand Rapids is about to launch its second bus rapid transit line, and there aren't any other in the state yet, so yeah.
Chad Livengood: Yeah, we do not have one yet. I mean they went big in that 2016 election, I wasn't covering it because I was knee deep in the presidential election and the Flint water crisis that year, but I could tell in their last couple of weeks, especially spending most of that time in Oakland and Macomb counties where, you know, ground zero of presidential elections, that the messaging was not all that robust, and that if you were just your average voter you would not understand what was in it for you.
So, if they're going to do it again, they’ve got to really, actually have a real message, and you've got to have your regional leaders actually all on board. You might recall that that one almost didn't even make it to the ballot in the early summer of 2016. It was pretty much as close to shotgun marriage as it gets, and Brooks Patterson didn't go out and campaign for it, and Mark Hackel didn't go out and campaign for it. They just, kind of, barely allowed it on the ballot…
Jeff Cranson: Yeah, I do remember. Well, I think we better wrap it up, there's so much more we could talk about. I think this has been fascinating, and I appreciate your time, Chad, and I hope that I can have you on again as this continues because I promised that I would have people both inside the department, outside the department and just about anybody that has any insight on all issues of mobility, so thanks for doing this.
Chad Livengood: Well, I appreciate it, I'm happy to do it, and I said at the outset that I'll always be writing about roads.
Narrator: That's a wrap for this edition of Talking Michigan Transportation. Check out show notes and more on Soundcloud, or by subscribing on Apple podcast.
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