The costly highways, sewers and other infrastructure — paid for by your taxes — can drive or slow sprawl.

Sprawl is driven in large part by the state's choices in the realm of built infrastructure. Take highways for example. How many times has a highway been built straight through the heart of a community, prime farmland or a unique habitat, making it even more difficult to keep people and businesses in that location, and instead pushing them farther away (after all, they can get there more readily now that this major highway expansion has been completed).

The context of a community should obviously be taken into account in infrastructure planning. Too often, transportation engineers build wider, flatter, straighter roads that reflect a "one-size-fits-all" approach to road design that is unresponsive or in conflict with community land use and design goals, when instead the state of Michigan should implement a Context Sensitive Design (CSD) program. This program, founded on research by the Federal Highway Administration and Scenic America, helps communities adopt design standards that consider an area's built and natural landscape; takes into account the environmental, scenic, aesthetic, historic, community, and preservation impacts of a road project; and provides access for other modes of transportation such as bicycles, pedestrians, and mass transit.

Context Sensitive Design (CSD) is among the most significant concepts to emerge in highway project planning, design, and construction in recent years. By "Thinking Beyond the Pavement," CSD reflects the increasingly urgent need for transportation departments to consider highway projects as more than transportation. CSD recognizes that a highway or road itself, by the way it is integrated within the community, can have far-reaching impacts beyond its traffic or transportation function. The term CSD refers to as much an approach or process as it does to an actual outcome.

In 1995, Congress passed the National Highway System Designation Act (NHSDA), emphasizing, among other things, flexibility in highway design to further promote preservation of historic, scenic, and aesthetic resources. This act provided funding capabilities for transportation enhancements and supported applications to modify design standards for the purpose of preserving important historical and scenic resources. Most importantly, the Act extended these considerations to federally funded transportation projects not on the Federal Highway System. The NHSDA allows projects on the NHS to take into account "the constructed and natural environment of the area," "the environmental, scenic, historic, community and preservation impacts of the activity," and "access for other modes of transportation." Five states have implemented NHSDA standards, including Connecticut, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, and Utah.

Rigid road-design standards left over from the 1950s force Michigan to pursue costly highways that must level hills, bisect farms, fill wetlands, and uproot communities. In Petoskey, for example, MDOT spent 15 years and $4 million insisting that it must build a $90 million, four-lane divided highway through the farms and forests of Emmet County. In September of 2002 MDOT finally announced that it would rescind its proposed highway project. This came only after years of fighting by citizens and a grassroots organization named Sensible Alternatives for a Valued Environment (SAVE). SAVE's message attracted the attention of the Michigan Land Use Institute and the Chicago-based Environmental Law and policy Center. Both organizations sponsored studies on alternative road building in Petoskey. In 1999 the message reached all the way to our nations capitol where Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Friends of the Earth named the proposed highway one of the nation's 50 worst road projects in a report titled "Road to Ruin." The community defeated the plan in 2002, after the Federal Highway Administration agreed that a more flexible, cost-effective approach that would preserve Petosky's downtown and the surrounding natural environment, was best to relieve congestion in Petoskey, a city of 6,000 residents.

Similarly, Michigan's local governments are not required to plan for or ensure that infrastructure will be in place to service land planned or zoned for more intensive development; they routinely zone more land for higher density or intensity than existing roads and other public services can properly accommodate. Despite slow population growth in most areas, Michigan's regions continue to expand outward.

Current land use planning, bolstered by uncoordinated and unsustainable state investments, perpetuates "greenfield" development and the "hollowing out" of cities and inner suburbs. The end result of such unbalanced growth is regional instability, inequitable provision of public services, service redundancy, and subsequent increases the overall costs of important public services.

Schools' taxpayers have spent $4 billion on new school buildings and school renovations since 1991, with much of the money going to build new schools in rural fringe areas. From 1991 to 2000, the percentage increase in new school buildings in Metro Detroit was more than double the growth in student population. In some districts, that has meant a new school every year. Meanwhile, many older suburbs are forced to close functional or even recently renovated schools. (Ferndale approved $45.7 million worth of renovations in 1995, but just seven years later had to move students out of four recently renovated schools because of declines in enrollment.) Better coordination between governments with land use planning authority and school agencies would streamline this inefficiency and save money.

Water and Sewer
Many communities in greater Detroit face failing or improperly sited septic systems and overflowing sewer systems. These faulty systems are sending untreated sewage to Lake St. Clair, a valuable regional resource that provides recreation, natural habitat, and drinking water to over 4.5 million people. But many of the cities and townships involved — both older communities in the region's core and new, tax-base poor communities on the fringe — don't have enough money to handle the cost of remediation, which could reach into the billions. Current development patterns and local fragmentation leave individual governments overburdened by sprawling water and sewer systems.

Transportation
Sprawling development also creates strains on the state's transportation system. A 1997 study at the University of California, Berkeley found that every 10% increase in road space generates a 9% increase in traffic over four years. While the study didn't examine Metro Detroit, traffic on recently widened Hall Road, in Macomb County, lends validity to the study. Moreover, the average commute in Michigan increased 14 percent during the 1990s, to 24.1 minutes. Supported by the state's low density built environment and automotive traditions, over 83 percent of Michigan commuters drove alone to work, the highest share of any state in the U.S. In Metro Detroit, the average commute increased from 23.7 minutes in 1990 to 26.3 minutes in 2000. These pressures are exposing the state's failure to adequately maintain existing roads as well as the insufficiency of its public transportation systems.

Sprawl is exacerbated by a lack of land use coordination and leadership at the state-level. State investment and leadership shape local level development and frequently fuel sprawling land use patterns. For example, The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has requested that over 200 acres of the publicly owned land on South Fox Island near Traverse City be swapped with privately owned lands. Included in the trade would be some of Michigan's most spectacular resources including 300-foot tall sand dunes, a 400-year old virgin pine forest and an ecosystem described as "globally rare." In another instance, the Department of Transportation recently planed an expansion of US-31 through land the Department of Agriculture was trying to protect. State policies should be coordinated and analyzed for their impact on local development patterns.

The uncoordinated state level land use policy and planning results in a disjointed approach to planning that renders many Michigan communities powerless to deal with sprawl. While numerous state agencies, including the DNR, MDOT, and MEDC, make decisions affecting land use, there is no mechanism for these bodies to coordinate their efforts.

Currently, state agency land use activities are isolated and at-odds with each other. Each year our state agencies invest billions of dollars in infrastructure, resource protection, and economic development, but they are not coordinating these activities. This lack of coordination also makes it difficult for local communities to ensure the community character is protected. The end result is redundancy and waste.
State grants, subsidies, and tax incentives currently favor Greenfield development over urban revitalization, farmland and open space preservation, and public transportation. A significant amount of Michigan's $30 billion annual state budget is wasted in state spending for roads, sewers, industrial parks, tax abatements, and other taxpayer subsidies that accelerate suburban sprawl. The state issues millions in tax abatements to businesses to build plants, offices, and other installations far from city centers. Each year, urbanized areas are left to deteriorate while hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money is funneled into costly and self-propagating expansion. Tax policy based on development possibility over farmland and open space preservation further results in sprawling development patterns. The total amount of spending on sprawl inducing subsidies could close the budget gap and rein in sprawl.

Finally, Michigan fails to recover hundreds of millions in federal transportation funds available to the state. Because Michigan lacks rapid bus or rail systems the sate is not eligible for federal rapid-transit money and fails to recoup about $100 million a year in federal transit taxes sent to Washington, D.C. The state recovers only about 43 percent of the state's transit funds compared to 92% of federal highway taxes. Furthermore, the current federal TEA-21 formula authorizes dramatic increases in spending for alternative transportation projects that address Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAG) challenges. Michigan has received only about half of the money available in this funding category. TEA-21 also authorizes nearly $100 billion in "flexible" funds that can be used by the sates for highways or transit planning and construction. Michigan has spent no money in this manner.