Taxpayers’ Union
Our petition to withdraw taxpayer funding for the proposed $685 million cycle and pedestrian bridge has now reached 56,000 signatures. That’s incredible, and it shows the depth of public opposition to such a brazenly wasteful vanity project.
Our “Stop SkyPath” billboards are currently hammering the message in Auckland and thanks to a few hundred supporters chipping in we’ve got some more going up next week.
Thank you to all our supporters who pitched in to make these billboards possible.
The fundraising effort has also allowed us to commission a professional pollster to get a measure of public opinion. We’re releasing the data over the weekend, but I can already tell you it does not look good for the bridge.
Thanks again to all of you who have chipped in to make this effort possible. We’ve got more billboard sites lined up in other parts of the country, so watch this space.
Here’s how the numbers (don’t) stack up. The Government was yesterday forced to reveal that the benefit-cost-ratio for this project is 0.4–0.6 to one. That means that for every taxpayer dollar spent, the Transport Ministry expects to see just 40 to 60c of value created.
As ACT’s David Seymour put it, Michael Woods is basically throwing your money away.
And even that figure seems wildly optimistic. It doesn’t take into account likely cost blowouts. And the Ministry’s calculations are based on 2,700 cyclists taking the trip across the bridge every day.
Assuming the cost of capital for the $685 million bridge is six percent, that equals a cost of $41.1 million per year, or $113,000 per day. Divided by 2,700 cyclists, that works out as a $41 subsidy for every individual trip!
In other words, a cyclist who uses the bridge to get to the city each day gets a taxpayer-funded handout of $15,000 per year!
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