Sen Shirley Johnson (R-Royal Oak) is leading a campaign by the Senate Republican leadership to put the legislature in control of Michigan's highway program. Senate Bill 1147 and its companion bills HB 5762 and SB 1168 would require the legislature to approve MDOT's annual highway construction schedule before any work can begin. It's easy to imagine how legislators will bargain and horse-trade over highway projects in each others' districts as their price for approving any work at all. The result would be a massive, billion-dollar pork barrel. Motorists would encounter overbuilt but little-used roads serving well-connected campaign contributors, and clogged, potholed roads in districts with no pull.
It's also easy to imagine how legislators, beholden to noisy NIMBY's in isolated neighborhoods, will block highway improvements through certain neighborhoods, regardless of how necessary the roads are to the rest of the state's taxpayers.
There's just no way the legislature can deal with the complicated job of scheduling highway repairs at thousands of locations each summer. Turning Michigan's road system into a giant pork barrel could eventually bring back corruption unseen since the Republican machine legislatures of the 1930's. Michigan's good highway system, such as it is, would be a thing of the past, too.
With the Republicans trying to turn the roads into a pork barrel, the Democrats trying to turn every city and township into a speed trap (P.A. 65 of 2003 and HB 5777), and the Granholm administration trying to raise fines and fees at every opportunity (P.A. 165 of 2003), Michigan motorists won't have any friends left in Lansing at all unless they start making themselves heard.
(And don't think you can just take the bus. Sen. Johnson wants to put the legislature in charge of the bus systems, too: see SB's 1103 & 1163.