The ‘Bridge Across Lake Michigan’ is Now a Meme – So Does That Mean it’s Gonna Happen?

In the modern era of internet culture, things can be memed into existence, can't they? Perhaps that will be the case with a bridge across Lake Michigan. What began as an impossible dream has now entered meme culture. The first step into reality?

The Bridge question first popped up in early 2025 with a thought exercise posted online that attempted to calculate the cost of such a bridge across the most narrow points of Lake Michigan (roughly Milwaukee to Grand Haven).

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The Lake Michigan Bridge Idea Takes Hold

The idea spread, as ideas do online - the wilder the better. And now those out of the loop are wondering why there is such a sudden interest in a Lake Michigan bridge.

The meme dates back to summer 2024 with a posting from someone who shared a Google Map driving directions from Milwaukee to Saugatuck. The posting questioned why a 4+ hour drive around the bottom of the lake through Northwest Indiana and Chicago was needed to connect Michigan and Wisconsin when the distance is less than 80 miles as the crow flies (78 miles from the end of 130th Ave at Douglas to Wind Point in Wisconsin).

From Map Query to Viral Meme and the Physics of an Impossible Jump

The cost to build any kind of transportation structure whether bridge, causeway or tunnel is prohibitively expensive and won't materialize in anyone's lifetime.

READ MORE: Truckers Regularly Cross Very Remote Areas of Michigan and Go Hundreds of Miles Out of Their Way to Avoid Chicago

But that didn't stop our memeing into existence crowd from contemplating how much velocity would be needed for a car to run up a ramp and jump the 80 mile lake gap. The answer: a vehicle would need to be travelling at 1328 miles per second to be able to Dukes of Hazzard across Lake Michigan.

The most sobering answer to the Lake Michigan Bridge meme? It's a meaningless discussion to fuel social media engagement and clicks:

Nearly everything on Facebook these days seems to be worthless content designed only to generate engagement, without providing any actual value to anyone. People who post this sort of garbage seem to feel like they have cracked the code of the human condition--namely that people love to feel smarter than someone else. By posting something that is so obviously wrong or impossible that literally everyone can respond and get to feel the sweet sweet ecstasy of being right, the people who post these sort of ridiculous claims are attempting to gain the maximum amount of engagement with the lowest amount of effort possible.

👇🏼BELOW: The Only Destination For These Special Highways are Michigan State Parks👇🏼

That throws a wet blanket over the Lake Michigan bridge concept. Or perhaps gives rise to a better question: how large a blanket would be needed to cover a hypothetical bridge across Lake Michigan and how much water would be needed to sufficiently wet a blanket like this? And since the blanket would be deployed in a cold weather environment and freeze in the winter, how much structural support would need to be added to the Lake Michigan bridge to support the added weight of a frozen wet blanket?

C'mon internet, do you thing. We need answers.