Midwest’s bottleneck bridge is getting help at last – but is it all good news?

Upgrade to Brent Spence Bridge linking Kentucky and Ohio clouded by concerns about cost overruns, pollution and housing

Connecting manufacturers in the industrial north to booming southern cities in Georgia and beyond in the south, the Brent Spence Bridge that spans the Ohio River is a debacle to all who know it.

Built and designed in the early 1960s to accommodate a maximum of 85,000 vehicles a day, today twice as many cars and trucks traverse it along the Interstate-75, a 1,785-mile (2,873km) route that stretches from the border with Canada in the north to the Florida Keys. Its narrow lanes, curved approaches and absence of emergency access lanes meant that, following frequent accidents, drivers could find themselves stuck for hours.