‘Blizzard Gates’ Exist on Highways Nearly Everywhere in the Snow Belt, Except Michigan

Perhaps you could consider it a compliment, the Michigan Department of Transportation trusts you to drive expressways across the state in any condition despite a prominent location within the nation's Snow Belt. Michigan has never installed 'blizzard gates' on its highways despite being very prevalent elsewhere in the northern climes.

The gates look exactly like railroad crossings complete with flashing red lights. They spend nearly all their life in the 'up' position and are only lowered during extreme weather when an expressway has officially closed due to conditions.

The rationale is that the gates will free up manpower during weather events so officials are not needed to camp out at freeway entrances to denote a given highway is closed.

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Such blizzard gates are common in Upstate New York, including the one pictured above in the notorious Lake Effect show-prone region around Buffalo. Elsewhere in the Great Lakes, they're common in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Further west, mountain states like Wyoming also use gates to close freeways during impassable weather.

In the south, the same system is used but for hurricane evacuation. The gates can be used to contraflow expressways to ease a weather exodus.

So why does Michigan not use on-ramp gates? It's an interesting question and one for which an online search does not yield any quick results. One may be a cost factor. When Wisconsin began installing gates, the estimate was anywhere from $9-14K per gate. Consider each freeway interchange could have 2, 4 or more entrance points, and just how many expressway interchanges there are in the state, the cost skyrockets very quickly.

So it is likely that Michigan will remain a snowbelt outlier when it comes to this quirky blizzard gates.