Every morning I get up and write this column. Some of the time, words just appear on the page, and it's easy. Other times, not so much. My best columns tap into timely local topics. Readers are the best sources for these. Here's a guide you can use to help me find them, thereby making my mornings easier. I've illustrated it with some of the process of looking into how local roads are maintained.

You know more than I do

The best perspective on writing about this city comes from Dan Gillmor, whom I first met when he was technology columnist for the Detroit Free Press. My readers know more than I do is the point of view he writes from, and to pull that off you have to continually cultivate connections with people who are aware of what is going on and observant about what is puzzling to them.

This doesn't mean that I try to write from a point of view of ignorance, though sometimes it feels like that. What it does mean is that at times I'm willing to get to a point where I have only an incomplete perspective on what is really going on at the end of an hour of writing, and where the gaps in the account depend on the readers to fill in pieces that this writer can't know.

Ask good questions

The best mornings are accompanied by research into some question, the answer to which should be possible to pin down but where it's not really clear where to start.

Google has created a monster problem for people like me who try to show off how smart they are by writing authoritatively about things that they have not experienced first hand. You only have to read 10,000 newspaper accounts that all read about the same about some tragedy on the other side of the world to realize that the vast power of the Internet is much more capable of replication than it is of accumulating insight.

My favorite stories start with innocent but detailed questions like what's up with that sidewalk and end up with a deeper understanding of what is hiding under the street.

The puzzle of the morning

This is all a roundabout way of getting to the puzzle of the morning, which has to do with the maintenance and care (or lack of care) of the concrete median and plantings at the corner of Washtenaw and East Stadium.

As you enter Ann Arbor from the east, Washtenaw turns towards town and East Stadium continues straight. The median is concrete and brick, with brush growing in the middle. Or at least it looks like brush, since there isn't a clear sense that the area is tended to. Every so often an advertising sign or political sign shows up in the median, but other than that there are no obvious signs of care.

A bunch of questions comes to mind, questions that should have answers but for which search engines appear to be useless. To wit:

If someone wanted to replace the scraggly weeds with something else, like the petunia plantings in Marquette that I noted last summer, who would you ask for permission? The road here is a state highway, but it's unclear who has day-to-day maintenance responsibilities.

What is the grand plan for Washtenaw Avenue, and does cutting the weeds depend on there being a grand plan?

Who has it in their ordinary workaday routine to maintain this median, and when is the last time they did this work?

The investigative news team of the Ann Arbor Newshawks took on this question last summer, using humor to make their point.

Writing down what you do find out

One strategy in asking good questions is to occasionally write down the answer to questions that you weren't asked, in the hopes that you can answer someone else's question along the way.

The discovery of the morning was the minutes of the Washtenaw County Road Commission board, which meets twice monthly to discuss road maintenance for county roads.

The board packet for the Nov. 4, 2010 meeting included this note regarding a section of local streets that gets frequent complaints:

Issued on October 13, 2010. A correspondence was issued by Roy Townsend, County Highway Engineer, to Homayoon Pirooz, Project Manager for the City of Ann Arbor, regarding an estimate for the resurfacing of Ann Arbor-Saline Road from Eisenhower to the EB I-94 ramps in 2011. A copy of this correspondence was provided to the Board for review.

So, the morning's work gets to an answer to a frequent question, in a roundabout way. Yes, plans are under way to fix the potholes on Ann Arbor-Saline Road.

Edward Vielmetti answers questions about highways in a roundabout way for AnnArbor.com.