Free Republic

Michigan drivers and taxpayers have been complaining about road and highway conditions for years. But the solutions policymakers have recently proposed ranged from the politically impossible, like raising the gas tax 45 cents per gallon, to financially-risky short-term fixes like borrowing billions in bonds to pay for teacher pension contributions so that money could be shifted to funding for roads. But it seems like Michigan lawmakers may be warming up to a long-term, sustainable, users-pay solution to achieving better roads: tolling. Lansing's interest in tolling has gone back decades but this year the state Legislature and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's administration...

A new Cline Avenue Bridge is rising in East Chicago, with more than a third of 29 piers in place that will carry traffic 100 feet above the Indiana Harbor Ship Canal, and with the casting of surface segments well underway in a building erected for that purpose at the bridge's Riley Road headquarters. The privately owned toll-bridge is scheduled to open to traffic in January 2020. "The project is moving along — it's on schedule," said Terry Velligan, the bridge's general manager of operations, on Tuesday. Normally 168 workers are on-site each day, he said. Velligan works for United...