Billion dollar bridges

I'm so old, I remember when the cost of building a bridge to cross the Ohio River was around $15 million.

Since then the price has gone to the hundreds of millions and in some cases into the billions.

Here's this news from the Evansville-Henderson area from The Messenger in Madisonville, Ky.:

The costs of various options for a Interstate 69 Ohio River crossing between Henderson and Evansville, Indiana, have been updated and now approach $1.5 billion.
Previous estimates ranged from $850 million to nearly $1 billion. The new estimates, one for each of the three possible crossings under consideration, now account for how much construction will cost when the bridges might actually be built and maintenance through 2062.
Financing the crossing, which is one of the final pieces left in completing I-69 from Canada to Mexico, will be a challenge. ... (T)raditional government funding, grants and tolls will be need to pay for it.

Read the entire article to get more details.

The two new bridges at Louisville came in at more than $1 billion each and charge tolls to cross. Then there is the billion-dollar project at Cincinnati that has been talked about for years.

Remember back in the 1960s when Everett Dirksen is supposed to have said, "A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money"?