Toll Road

* Question: What do you have when you take a wonderfully engineered road that is easily accessible, convenient, well-traveled and fully paid for by taxpayers, and you tear it up, reroute it for a year and a half so that it is inaccessible, inconvenient and indirect? Then, you reopen the road and charge the same taxpayers a 50-cent toll for the privilege of driving on it?

Answer: Newport Coast Road.

KAREN WOTHERSPOON

Newport Coast DAVID FITZGERALD / Los Angeles Times