As the first-year chair of Michigan’s State Senate transportation committee, the Downriver Democrat Erika Geiss is a Lansing leader with partial power to “Fix the Damn Roads.”
So she chooses her words carefully. One of them is a four-letter word: “T-o-l-l,” a road that leads to controversy.
“It is among the options we have the potential to look at,” Geiss says in a telephone interview with Metro Times. “Change is hard. We’re not at the point where we’re going to do this. It’s something we’re going to have to grapple with.”
The issue is whether to turn some of the state’s highways into toll roads to raise revenue in an era of changing habits regarding the use of gasoline. A major study of tolls has been in the hands of the Legislature since the start of the year.
Among possible toll roads are parts of I-75, the major “Up North” pathway to vacationland, where the bays have their own bays and the peninsulas even have their own peninsulas.
“It’s something we are going to need to think about,” Geiss says of toll roads. “Most people have a visceral reaction to tolling.”
That reaction is usually negative.
Despite Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s 2018 campaign pledge to “Fix the Damn Roads,” Michiganders don’t really want to pay for necessary upkeep. The legislature voted down a fuel tax increase in 2019.
In a state with an aging population, senior citizens — many on fixed incomes — are reluctant to increase the cost of anything.
In the Great Lakes State, we prefer to trust that our Pure Michigan weather and our Pure Michigan traffic volume will self-heal all those potholes and cracks while welcoming hoards of out-of-state tourists to our summer vacationland paradise.
Although Michigan currently takes in $1.5 billion annually in gasoline taxes for the roads, that figure is expected to decline steadily with the growing use of fuel-efficient hybrids and electric vehicles which don’t use gasoline, a fossil fuel that contaminates the environment.
If you drive more than a few hours out of Detroit, you will reach states like Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that have used toll roads for decades. Most of their roads are in better shape than those in Michigan.
Geiss says she used toll roads in Massachusetts when attending college at Brandeis and Tufts.
“For those of us familiar with toll roads,” she says, “I think it’s probably an easier sell.”
States like Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have used toll roads for decades. Most of their roads are in better shape than those in Michigan.
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Geiss stressed that some people might not be familiar with technological improvements on toll roads. Under the multi-state EZ Pass system, for instance, overhead electronic readers record toll fees off transponders fastened to windshields.
This allows motorists to pay without stopping at a toll booth to hand over coins, bills, or credit cards. Drivers need not even slow down. Sonny Corleone has nothing to worry about.
Early this year, Gov. Whitmer told reporters that a switch to toll roads could be “part of a long-term solution . . . our outdated system of funding roads needs to be addressed.”
But tolls could be “oppressive,” Geiss says, on people of low income. So that problem must be factored in.
“If we do it, it’s not going to be a binary choice,” Geiss says. “It’s going to take a lot of education . . . Our current mechanisms are going to have to change. We really have to rethink what the rest of the 21st Century looks like.”
She says that if tolls are implemented, “It would have to be a partial option . . . in a diversified portfolio.”
Along with I-75, other highways among the 14 under consideration for tolls include I-94 and I-96. But there would be no tolls within metro Detroit.
When the Legislature reconvenes later this month. Geiss and her colleagues may have a more immediate issue for inquiry, a situation that may help explain to Michiganders why they pay so much for so little improvement to state roads.
According to an exclusive report in the Detroit News late last month, the Justice Department is investigating allegations that asphalt companies in the Detroit area conspired to rig bids and inflate prices to pave roads and other surfaces.
The antitrust investigation, the News reported, is expected to grow into a broader industry-wide crackdown. Citing federal search-warrant documents, the News added, “The documents and ongoing investigation raise questions about whether taxpayers and private customers paid inflated rates for asphalt services and whether some of the industry’s largest companies colluded to control the market and crowd out smaller competitors.”
So a corruption investigation and the possibility of toll roads are two more things to fret about in Michigan as we travel the contentious highway from the internal combustion engine to battery-powered EVs. Are we lost? How did we get here? Does anyone have an old map?
Remember the oil crisis of the late 1970s — before the era of murderous “road rage” and cellphone distraction — when drivers were angry mostly about the high price of gasoline and the long lines at service stations?
We knew how to fix that: Build and buy smaller vehicles that were more fuel-efficient. So, instead, we treated ourselves to massive pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles which take up more room, burn up more pollutants, and kill more pedestrians.
And we cringe with indignation when money from Saudi Arabia mounts a hostile takeover of professional golf and muscles in on other sports in a summer filled with dangerous heat waves and poisonous air.
The free market is speaking, people, and it is telling us something we don’t want to hear: Everything takes a toll.
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