How does the Michigan Department of Transportation determine which roads to prioritize when it comes to state funded construction projects? MDOT Chief Operations Officer Gregg Brunner joined last week’s episode of the Talking Michigan Transportation podcast to give insight on the topic.
Brunner says they tend to prioritize projects that will be quicker fixes in order to keep down costs rather than a worst-first approach.
“When you start looking at the overall construction costs we’re seeing lately, they get pretty astronomical when you start talking about just to reconstruct a lane mile of roadway, we’re looking at almost $4 million a lane mile,” Brunner said. “So you can only imagine with a limited budget, that only goes so far when we’re trying to take care of the entire state of Michigan. It’s something that we’ve been doing quite a while with an aggressive asset management approach, but it’s actually been recognized nationally as the best practice.”
Brunner says road construction costs are starting to even out, but are still up 30% from the start of the pandemic.
