Driving in Michigan between November and April can often be treach­er­ous; with the eco­nomic down­turn and bud­get cuts, this win­ter is worse than ever.

Obviously the unpre­dictable, uncon­trol­lable weather is the influ­enc­ing fac­tor in the con­di­tion of the roads. History gives us a good indi­ca­tion that it will indeed be snowy and icy in Michigan dur­ing these win­ter months.

When storms come out of nowhere and cover the roads, it is under­stand­able that trucks are work­ing hard and can­not pos­si­bly clear every road. However, when a huge storm is pre­dicted a few days in advance and there are no salt trucks prepar­ing the roads, then we have a problem.

Thanksgiving week­end I was lis­ten­ing to a sports talk-radio show out of Detroit and the DJ was going off about how I-75 was cov­ered with three inches of snow and there were no plow or salt trucks in sight. He went on to say that he saw over a dozen cars off the road because of the con­di­tions.
I under­stand that we are in a “reces­sion” and money is not grow­ing on trees any­more, but reduc­ing the num­ber of plow and salt trucks is absurd.

Drivers need to feel safe when dri­ving to work or going to pick up their kids from school.

It is not like peo­ple can afford to stop dri­ving. Work does not get can­celled the way school does. People still need to go to the bank, gro­cery store, post office, gas sta­tion and other nec­es­sary places.

It took my dad two hours to get to work one day because I-96 was com­pletely cov­ered. Part of that prob­lem is also being stuck behind small cars that can­not han­dle the snow as well as his four-wheel drive truck. The other part is that plow trucks should have been clear­ing snow dur­ing the night and they obvi­ously were not.

The safety of all dri­vers is being risked to save a few bucks. Is this really the best place to be cut­ting back? Icy and snowy roads take many lives each year even when they are salted and plowed. I do not want to even imag­ine what will hap­pen if they con­tinue to be plowed and salted less.

Every year, the state gov­ern­ment makes a bud­get and there are always upset peo­ple because of the cuts made. There is no sit­u­a­tion that would make every sin­gle per­son happy. I am not advo­cat­ing that the state cut edu­ca­tion or hos­pi­tal fund­ing or other vital spend­ing areas; I am merely sug­gest­ing that safety be moved up a few rungs on the lad­der and clear­ing roads be taken more seri­ously than it is being taken this year.

It is not like all spend­ing on roads was cut. You still can­not drive any­where in Michigan in the sum­mer with­out run­ning into con­struc­tion at some point along the trip.

As the econ­omy improves and fewer cuts have to be made, this prob­lem will sort itself out. There is no exact way to mea­sure how long that could take, how­ever. If the econ­omy con­tin­ues to strug­gle over the next few years, I cer­tainly hope for all our sakes that the roads get plowed and salted far more fre­quently than they have been this winter.