Sixty-two year old Mike Watts got fed up with the traffic problems and disruption a 14-mile detour caused by the closure of a section of the A431 highway in the UK so he took it upon himself to fix the problem by building a toll road to bypass the closure.
A grandfather sick of roadworks near his home defied his council and built his own toll road allowing people to circumvent the disrupted section.The government wasn't willing to do anything about it so he did it himself, solving a problem that was seriously affecting the daily lives of the people near the highway closure. That he was also making some money off of it is icing on the cake.
[He] hired a crew of workmen and ploughed £150,000 ($252,000) of his own cash into building a 365m (about a quarter mile) long bypass road in a field next to the closed A431. He reckons it will cost another £150,000 ($252,000) in upkeep costs and to pay for two 24 hour a day toll booth operators.