This is a good discussion. I'll weigh in.

Michigan differs from other midwestern states in three ways that are relevant to a discussion about crumbling roads and gas taxes.

1. We allow much heavier trucks than all other states.
2. Other states have one or more toll expressways, which pay their own way, so what money the state does have for highway maintenance [[of the free roads) is not spread so thinly.
3. In the other states, metro regions which are not growing in population are not building roads. We built the M-53 expressway, the bizarrely wide M-59, and the M-5 extension, not because the regional population was growing [[it was not), but to further subsidize disinvestment of the core city and expansion of the metro populated region farther into the exurbs. [[The M-53 expressway, for example, ends near THIRTY-FOUR Mile Road.)

These are all choices we have made as a state, and we could unmake them, but I bet anybody on this forum five dollars that we don't.