Makes sense, especially if you have lots of money to add toll booths and barriers to enforce the tolls. Here in Michigan, we don't have a lot of cash lying around.

Now comes a new twist: add just one toll lane.

The city of Austin, Tex., where traffic is becoming more and more snarled, they are doing just that. I read about it (where else?) on the Freakonomics blog.

On Michigan's roads, there are actually three seasons: winter, road construction, and deer hit season.

Deer hits are common throughout the year, but, as we all know, they really ramp up in October and November. In all of 2011, there 53,592 deer crashes according to the Michigan State Police Criminal Justice Information Center. That's down by nearly 2,000 from the previous year. But in eight of those crashes, people died.

You can imagine the cost in injuries to people and damage repair to vehicles, let alone the cost to the deer. We're crashing into them, shooting at them. I'd be moving out, but I'm not a forest dwelling ruminant.

How can you avoid deer hits? The nuclear option would be to move to Australia; they don't have deer there. Short of that, the Michigan Deer Crash Coalition has some ideas:

That last one will be hard. We have to get in the habit of slowing down and driving straight when we see a deer.

Here are the 2011 statistics county-by-county:

I have never seen this kind of public notice, but that doesn't mean governments haven't sent them out.

The Kalamazoo County Road Commission is recommending that you shake your mailbox. That is, if you have a mailbox on a post next to the street, make sure it is secure in the ground before the snow flies.

I don't have such a mailbox, but they got my attention.

In a recent press release, the commission said that most mailboxes that are damaged in the winter are not hit by snowplows, but they are damaged when snow is pushed against them by snowplows and the mailboxes are not solidly anchored in the ground.

Hence the phrase, Shake Your Mailbox.

See if it's loose. A firmly planted mailbox stands a better chance to remain standing against the onslaught of snow kicked up by city and county plows.

Makes sense.

Saturday, October 20, is Shake Your Mailbox Day. Yes, there's a Shake Your Mailbox Day. 

By the way, government, including the Kalamazoo County Road Commission, does not take responsibility for mailboxes damaged as a result of snowplowing operations, but KCRC will take a claim into consideration if it is clear that damage was caused by direct contact from one of their snowplows.

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Jean Jennings has her own web site, and Ford has picked her up to sponsor her new TV segments. 

Don't expect the same old thing from Jean, even though she has lived and breathed cars all her life. 

Don't believe me? Watch our first interview:

They say gas prices tend to change on Tuesdays, and this email notice was sent Monday night.

Let's see how close they come.

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I'll be participating in the 55th Annual Labor Day Mackinac Bridge Walk. It's something I have wanted to do since moving to Michigan back in the 80's. I have roped my family into coming along, though the camping trip includes the promise of a day on Mackinac Island.

If you have walked the bridge in the past, there is now an MDOT contest where you can win a tour of the Mighty Mac. And that means seeing the bridge from the top down: a trip to the top of one of the towers.

Go to MDOT's Facebook page and post your favorite memories of walking the bridge. The winner will be chosen as random from everyone who posts. The person who posts a story about traveling the farthest to walk the bridge will get some Pure Michigan swag.

If I dared to dream big, I would put a tour of the bridge on my bucket list. I haven't walked the bridge yet, so I can't enter. Should I dare to dream?

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It took Isaac to force their hand.

Regular unleaded was $4.00 a gallon at one station in Grand Rapids Tuesday morning. According to my GasBuddy app, it was the first station in all of the Grand Rapids-Holland-Kalamazoo-Battle Creek area to make the leap.

In an email this morning, Patrick DeHaan of GasBuddy blamed tropical storm Isaac and "murky regional refining issues" for a jump of 35 cents per gallon in the wholesale price of gasoline on Monday. Understandably, oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico have gone offline as the storm got near.

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I like one of the two new license plates unveiled today by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson.

You may feel different.

Both plates are "Pure Michigan" plates. One is a simple blue-on-white, with the Pure Michigan logo at the top and a wave-like swirl at the bottom. To me, it's a bit generic.

The big news: this will be Michigan's new standard plate beginning in 2013.

The other one may generate much stronger responses from people, for and against. Picturing the Mackinac Bridge in front of a sunset, I think people might be put off by the colors. The lake water is a kind of turqoise, and it clashes a bit with the oranges of the sunset.

At least it stands out.

I think I like it.

The white letters and numbers might be hard to read, especially at night.

What do you think?  Tell me.

The new plates with the bridge won't be available to order until 2013.

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Technically called autonomous vehicles (hey, they'll be autonomous when they gas up themselves and pay for it), Nevada has already made them legal and issued a license to Google to operate one in the state. I hear that New York is looking at the question.

A notice from MDOT just landed in my inbox that announces that the state is issuing a survey to manufacturers involved in making autonomous cars and the technology that goes into them. The Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor is MDOT's partner.

Believers in self-driving cars, and Google is the leader in the movement, claim that crashes can be drastically reduced when the task of driving is turned over to technology. Certainly, cars that run themselves won't spend time fiddling with a phone or feel road rage.

Why a survey? I'm not clear. In the release, Michigan Transportation Director Kirk Steudle is quoted: "This survey will play a pivotal role in determining what autonomous vehicle and robotics manufacturers need as a platform to further develop, test and deploy this technology." 

The release implies that southeast Michigan would be a perfect place to research and develop autonomous vehicles. But it doesn't say Michigan is seriously looking at making them legal the way Nevada did.

Yet.

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How about adopting one?

In a move modeled after the Adopt-A-Highway program, MDOT hopes that tourism groups will step up and support their local welcome centers. The Marquette County Convention and Visitors Bureau is the first to sign on.

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