Constructing Down the Highway....

The Detroit News: MDOT ready for highway repairs

In total, MDOT will award about $179 million in contracts this year to improve 87 miles of pavement and repair 67 bridges in the [Detroit] Metro area

Thankfully, they won't be completely shutting a highway down this year, so we at least have that to look forward to once spring arrives.

However, as with all Blue State Model projects, the costs are going up and actual amount accomplished is going down:

We're doing a lot of resurfacing projects this year," the spokesman [Robert Morosi] said. "As an example, for $5 million, we can resurface three lanes of a five-mile stretch of freeway, which will extend the life of the roadway by five to seven years. That same $5 million would only allow us to reconstruct one mile of one lane of the same freeway."

When it takes $5 million dollars to reconstruct just one mile of highway, or to put it in perspective, about $1000 per foot of highway, you know your costs are just plain out of control.

On the upside, the mild weather we're having is saving money on salt and plowing costs:

Morosi said MDOT also has no complaints about the mild weather for the 2011-12 winter.

"So far this year, our expenditure for this winter is $12.8 million," Morosi said. "This same time for last year we spent $21.3 million. We could still get slammed this winter, but so far, so good."

Mild winter weather is certainly a plus for saving the state some money, heck we can reconstruct almost 2 miles of a highway with the savings!