I’m not really someone who plans well for the future. I don’t have a place to live yet during the next school year. I’m not really sure when I’m going to graduate. And pretty much everything after graduation is up in the air for me.

So in light of my complete disinterest in deciding where I’m going to be in 10 years, I’m proud to say that I made one of those highly touted life-structuring decisions last weekend.

My decision: I will never, ever live in the state of Michigan once I’m out of college.

Don’t get me wrong: I love this state. I was born here. I’ve lived here my whole life. Almost all of my friends and family live here. I’ve practically never even vacationed outside of this state.

But, sitting in traffic on my way to my mom’s house in Macomb last weekend, I had an epiphany. Michigan is going nowhere fast. It’s a failing state, caught in a vicious downward spiral that it’s not likely to get out of unless things change dramatically. The pessimist in me says that won’t happen.

Although it was probably the traffic that set me off, as I thought about it more, Michigan’s roads perfectly illustrate what is wrong here.

As any good Michigander knows, if you hope to get anywhere in Michigan, your only option is to drive. Decades ago, the Big Three deleted public transportation from our vocabulary and kept it off our legislators’ agendas. So everyone drives everywhere.

All that driving, along with the weather, the trucks and the salt, has taken a predictable toll on Michigan’s roads. Michigan now has the eighth worst road system in the United States, according to a 2007 report by the Reason Foundation. Worse yet, the Michigan Department of Transportation released a report in May saying that more than 3,000 bridges in the state are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. In the next five years, MDOT only plans to fix a little more than 80 percent of those bridges.

Without functional roads, no right-minded business wants to be in Michigan. In fact, when Volkswagen pulled out of Michigan last summer, Michigan’s crumbling infrastructure was one of its main reasons for its departure. It’s more costly to travel on beat-up, slow highways, and, frankly, it’s less prestigious when foreign clients stop by. Better to move south or out west, where salt trucks don’t dig out crater-size potholes each winter and traffic is an exception not the rule, than stay in Michigan.

But fixing the roads is expensive. An advisory panel appointed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm reported last week that just getting Michigan’s roads and bridges into “good shape” would require almost doubling transportation spending from $3.2 billion to $6.1 billion. An expanded, quality system would require increasing spending to $12.6 billion each year.

Obviously, Michigan doesn’t have that kind of money.

But maybe fixing roads isn’t a short-term priority. I can understand that, especially if the state is spending the money on more immediate concerns like unemployment. You can always gamble on infrastructure and hope that it holds up. It usually does.

Well, Michigan spends more than $2 billion a year to lock up more than 50,000 people. That makes it only one of four states in the country to spend more money on prisons than higher education. Frankly, that doesn’t sound like a very good way to spend money that could be spent on schools, roads or bridges.

So what are young people like me left with? While big businesses like Volkswagen are leaving, the Big Three is collapsing and Michigan residents are sucking up unemployment dollars in the absence of these businesses. Behind it all is a state government more intent on hoping something will pull the state out of the spiral than working to pull it out itself. That’s a pretty bad situation, and one that doesn’t look like it’s going to improve anytime soon.

I may not be good at planning out my future. But Michigan is much worse. That gives me no reason to stay.

Gary Graca is the Daily's summer managing editor. He can be reached at gmgraca@umich.edu.