Dan A. wrote:
I would concur with cold, salty places in general having bad roads. Fluctuations in temperature have a finger in that unappetizing pie, too.
Especially if you have fluctuations of melt and freeze: early Spring is pothole season. So the only solution for good roads, if you insist on living in such godforsaken circumstances, is diligent upkeep. And that, of course, means taxes to fund public works. There's no getting around that end of it.
But almost every place is going to have its own environmental wear-and-tear on roads; when I visited Louisiana it got so hot that the highway asphalt buckled from the expansion, and naturally there were accidents. Actually saw this happen once or twice in Minnesota, too. And don't gape: On one summer day it got to 103F in MPLS, whereas it was only a balmy 87F in bloody Cairo. Yes, Egypt. Not Illinois.
Katharine wrote:
Where I live, the roads definitely suck. I've not really driven on roads in other states, so I don't know if they're unusually bad here like some people say, or if roads are going to suck everywhere you have cold and snow and salt.
I've been to Michigan only once; destination Grand Rapids, a wedding reception gig. Lovely state, BTW. We tightly crammed everything into an SUV and took the scenic route: a visit to some town with strong associations to the band KISS (our bass player insisted on this act of devotion), up into the UP and down through the Mackinac bridge; from there as it got more urbanized it got more confusing. Fortunately for the gig, I did no driving, so we didn't get lost. The upshot is that wherever we went on that long trip, I don't recall the roads being notably bad. But maybe I was ...
distracted, let's call it.

EDIT: I just checked Google Images for Michigan roads, and gnarly ones were far and away the main subject. Pretty bad - nothing like I'd ever seen. Not to make you Michiganders feel bad, but ...
damn. I would have noticed conditions like those on the road trip, though, so maybe we just lucked out.