You can’t get from here to there. We’ve all seen the countless orange signs along the roadside: “detour,” “construction,”  “road closed.” The bright obstructions are popping up everywhere, seemingly with no end in sight.

Due to the harsh conditions of this past winter and the winter of the year prior, Michigan roads took a serious toll, a toll which is just now resulting in repairs.

Sections of roads, including Adams from Gunn to Silverbell, Squirrel from Dutton to Walton, and Tienken from Adams to Rochester have all been closed at one point or another in order to improve potholes and potentially hazardous road conditions. One common thread between these roads is the impact they have on the morning commute of the students of Rochester Adams High School.

Adams’ students seem to have a universal reaction to the road closures.  They are frustrated with the added traffic in the morning,  yet they do understand the importance of maintaining safe road conditions.

“If I leave earlier, it adds between five and ten minutes onto my drive to school,” senior Bobby Mishra said. “It’s a bit of an inconvenience, but at least it improves the roads so our cars won’t undergo as much damage compared to if the roads weren’t fixed.”

It seems that an easy fix to saving those extra five or ten minutes of driving each morning would simply be to take an alternate route. That would be a great idea, if every other student didn’t have the same thing in mind. Students who normally take Squirrel and Tienken are now using Adams to get to school, thus causing even more of a delay.

“It’s hard because everyone who normally takes Squirrel has to switch to Adams for the time being,” said junior Nikki Schipperijn. “That makes more traffic so I have to leave earlier, which means waking up earlier than I already do.”

On top of the incoming traffic caused by the closures of Tienken and Squirrel, construction on Adams Road lengthened the drive to school for nearly a week due to pothole reconstruction. Luckily, the road recently reopened, somewhat easing the commute for students.

Along with the completion of construction on Adams, sections of Tienken, from Rochester to Livernois as well as from Brewster to Adams, have been reopened as of September 6. These two factors provide a sense of hope for all students and nurture the possibility that the end of road reconstruction affecting their morning commute could be near.