You may have seen an article on social media ranking Michigan’s 83 counties by the quality of their roads.
MLive used data from the Transportation Asset Management Council, which follows the Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating system to determine road quality, and Berrien, Cass, and Van Buren counties all were shown to be in the bottom 20 counties for roads. However, they have been improving.
Berrien County Road Department Director Mark Heyliger told us the county has adopted an asset management plan that regularly grades all roads the department maintains while planning ahead to ensure the system is always getting better.
“For example, in 2017, we were at 26% good or fair and 74% poor,” Heyliger said. “As we’ve developed the asset management plans of the department, we’ve managed to move the road ratings from those numbers to 41% good or fair and only 59% poor on the primary road network.”
The PACER system shows Berrien with 51% poor roads, 30% fair, and 19% good. However, Heyliger says that data considered all roads in the county, and not just those maintained by the county road department.
For Van Buren County, PACER shows 52% of the roads are bad, 29% are fair, and 19% are good. Van Buren Road Commission Managing Director Bret Witkowski tells us with asset management tools, the road commission can prevent a good road from degrading.
“Asset management doesn’t necessarily mean you take the worst road and rebuild it,” Witkowski said. “Sometimes you take the road that is not quite getting bad and rebuild that, and then as you get funds, you take care of the worst roads after that.”
That prevents a decent road from falling into the poor category.
Witkowski says one thing the Van Buren County Road Commission has been doing is sealcoating roads. That’s when stones are laid on top of them with a special surfacing material the rocks will eventually become embedded in. He says that can extend the life of a surface by ten years, and Van Buren County is sealcoating around 187 miles of roads this year.
However, Witkowski says there is an ongoing problem with road funding being inadequate. He believes the road funding system needs to be totally overhauled.
Using Transportation Asset Management Council data, Cass County has the tenth worst roads in the state, Van Buren is 13th, and Berrien is 15th. Heyliger and Witkowski say those numbers will continually improve as new tools are used to attack road issues in a strategic fashion.
