Prague's Barrandov Bridge repair savings claim questioned

Pirate Party candidate for Prague mayor and economist Nislavová, together with MP Zdeněk Hřib, claimed in a social media video that Prague residents saved more than 2 billion crowns thanks to the Barrandov Bridge repairs finishing ahead of schedule. A fact-check by the Czech program PoliCheck found that the figure was based on several errors.

How the Pirates did the math

In the video, Nislavová, behind the wheel, asks Hřib, wearing a helmet, how he “saved Praguers billions.” Together they work out a formula: 190,000 people use the bridge every day, the earlier completion saves each of them ten minutes, and they value an hour of a person's time at 200 crowns. Multiplying the result by 365 days gives a sum of more than two billion crowns.

A flawed day count — and flawed logic

The multiplier itself — 365 days — is already misleading. Although under the original schedule the repairs were not due to finish until 2025, the final stage was never planned to last a whole year: the contractor had budgeted just 82 days of traffic restrictions — a figure the Pirates themselves had previously published on their own website. On top of that, the bridge was supposed to remain open to three lanes in each direction throughout the work.

Even setting aside the absurdity of the calculation itself, it leaves out the other side of the coin: while drivers may have gained a little time on some stretches, traffic jams grew longer on many others. The claimed ten-minute saving is also questionable — according to the Waze app, travel time across the bridge itself actually increased by about a minute during the first stage. Ahead of the second, less disruptive stage, the head of the Road and Motorway Directorate expected 10–15 minutes of delays during rush hour, but after the work was finished the city spoke of only a few minutes' delay.

The repair cost nearly doubled

Work on the Barrandov Bridge was indeed finished in November 2024, ahead of the original schedule. But the repairs also became significantly more expensive — something the video does not mention at all: the cost of the main reconstruction rose from 594.5 million to 1.14 billion crowns excluding VAT. The reasons included, among other things, the bridge structure being in worse condition than expected and a change in the technology used.

Praguers will not actually see the promised billions in savings anywhere: Nislavová and Hřib simply converted people's time into money, and given the input data used, that conversion itself turned out to be highly questionable.

Source: novinky.cz