Michigan Department of Transportation

The seasonal parks are expected to reopen in late April.

A map of MDOT's roadside parks is available online.

And Washtenaw Community College is expanding its welding program to prepare students for careers in shipbuilding, maritime repair, and advanced manufacturing.

A new state grant of more than six hundred and thirty thousand dollars will fund robotic welding equipment, hands-on training, and development of a proposed marine structural welding and ship repair certificate.

is it basically like however fast everyone goes, you basically change it to what the comfortability is.

And by, and by the way, Right out of the mouth of the director of the County Road Commission and the executive director of the Michigan Department of Transportation, speed limits go up, they don't go down.

Every single time they do one of these studies, they look at the public and they go, just so you know, the study showed it should be five miles or faster.

You don't want a road study because it's going to go the wrong way, guys.

It was all highway.

So it's all the I-94, I-96, I-69, which is nice, but they fixed less than 5% of the highway system, the MDOT system.

Yeah.

So our plan focuses on the driveway to highway, which is some of the most ignored road services in Michigan.

A former Traverse City Cafe owner faces 10 federal charges for allegedly failing to pay taxes.

And MDOT will conduct soil testing along M119 in Emmett County.

to help fix reoccurring flooding.

Also, later, even further along in today's show, I'll be joined by the Communications Director for Power of the Future, Larry Behrens, to talk about his latest op-ed in The Blaze, why he says Democrats are being hypocritical when they complain about high gas prices.

The Michigan Department of Transportation will conduct soil testing next week along M119 in Emmett County to investigate ongoing flooding near Beach Road.

Heavy rain has caused water to overflow the Little Traverse wheelway and spill onto the highway, disrupting traffic.

MDOT has installed a drainage pipe but is exploring a more permanent solution.

The soil test will help determine whether the ground is stable enough for construction or needs to be removed and replaced.

He urged all motorists to remain entirely focused, reduce their speed, and give crews the safe clearance they need to do their jobs.

So with that in mind, I'm resurrecting an episode from two thousand twenty-five when Gregg Brunner, the COO at MDOT, talked about work zone crashes and what's being done to prevent them.

As always, the focus needs to be on driver responsibility, despite all kinds of technology and all kinds of improvements that can be made to make work zones safer for drivers and workers.

So Gregg Brunner, the chief operations officer at MDOT, I mentioned in the introduction why this topic is particularly important to him.

Um, to give you...

I think I've talked about this before [chuckles] on the podcast, but to give people a sense of his commitment to work zone safety, he has a full orange suit that he wears, uh, on the work zone safety awareness kickoff each year, and, uh, gets a lot of, a lot of comments, and, uh, the whole idea is to draw attention to it, and I think it works.

Greg, um, thanks for taking time to talk today.

I was, um, really struck by a message that you sent out to staff, operations staff around the state in the wake of a series of incredibly tragic events that, one involved a former MDOT engineer who worked for a consulting engineering company.

And so I went out and I got a job, um, with the Mackinac Bridge, where I work now.

So I work for the Mackinac Bridge Authority, which is a, um, under the umbrella of Michigan Department of Transportation, but it's its own entity.

Um, now are you familiar with the Mackinac Bridge?

I'm not.

Yeah.

You know? You look at this stretch right here from Bay College to what used to be the store is, I've looked at the MDOT's maps.

Mm-hmm.

It's the busiest stretch in the Upper Peninsula.