The final nail has gone into the coffin of the $785 million Auckland Harbour cycling and walking bridge again highlighting the inability of the Labour Government to deliver on transport, National’s Transport spokesperson David Bennett says.

“The Cycle Bridge was Minister Michael Wood’s personal pet project, he wanted to make it his showpiece project and this failure will have been a significant blow.

“It was a project designed for the urban elite of the Labour Party, but Aucklanders overwhelmingly opposed it. Senior Ministers were forced to diffuse the idea in what has been an awkward phase of denying the project was canned, but trying to distance themselves from it.

“This was an idea that was never going to work in the first place. What the Minister should have been doing is investigating a multi-modal solution to connect the North Shore to Auckland Central which would have given more certainty to Aucklanders about the Transport network going forward.”

“National’s opposition to the foolish project has paid off, but now we want to see that workable solutions to a second harbour crossing are explored. Auckland needs to update its connection to the North Shore, but a Cycle Bridge was never going to do it,” says National’s MP for the North Shore Simon Watts.

“We need to think to the future of Auckland and that means providing multiple transport options.”