A six-lane motorway over the Peaks?

Good afternoon members — and welcome to Thursday’s Tribune.

I’m no stranger to Snake Pass. As a Lancastrian I use it about four or five times a year to visit family or when I go home for Christmas. Using the road just a handful of times every year isn’t too bad. In fact it can be quite good fun. But if you have to use it more regularly for work, a single-lane road that is closed for 70 days a year must be frustrating, to put it gently.

Yes, various experts say poor transport links with the largest city in the north is costing Sheffield money. But it’s also a safety hazard — earlier this year Snake Pass was even named on a list of the top ten most dangerous roads in the world. So what can and should be done about it?

Question Coppard: On Monday, The Tribune’s data and policy writer Daniel Timms and I will be interviewing South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard about his first year in office. If you have any burning questions that you’d like us to ask him, please email editor@sheffieldtribune.co.uk or hit reply to this newsletter.

Editor’s note: I attended our sister title The Mill’s third birthday on Tuesday. It was a chance online connection with its editor Joshi Herrmann in 2020 that ultimately (and happily) led to the creation of The Tribune. Across our three sites in Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool, we now have almost 5,000 paying members. As Victor Hugo once said, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. We want to produce high-quality, thoughtful, longform journalism at a local level. To support the renaissance of high-quality journalism in the North and guarantee that we are never forced to write a piece of clickbait about a London-based celebrity to get the maximum numbers of eyeballs on a page, join today.

A six lane motorway over the Peak District?

“I’m always looking for a one liner,” data guru and infrastructure fan Tom Forth tells me.

A few examples. Leeds is the largest city in Europe without a mass transit system. Manchester is the largest city in Europe without an underground system. As he made his way through the great cities of the North, Forth eventually came to Sheffield. In terms of its rail connections, it’s definitely the largest city in Europe which doesn’t currently have electrified trains. However, when he was looking for a pithy way to describe just how bad our infrastructure is, he decided that what was more important — especially for Sheffield, especially with the airport closing — is that Sheffield and Manchester are the two biggest adjacent cities in Europe that aren’t connected by a motorway.

Taking to Twitter, he fired off a (very long) thread on the subject. Juxtaposing a picture of Snake Pass with the I-35 in Texas, he wrote: “The road connecting Sheffield and Manchester compared to the road connecting similarly* sized and distant Austin and San Antonio.” According to Google Maps, the 38-mile drive from Manchester to Sheffield takes 1h 53m. At an average of 20mph. From Austin to San Antonio? The 80-mile drive takes 1h19m. At an average of 62mph.

The flat and wide open spaces of central Texas are obviously not the same as Derbyshire hill country. But closer to home, Amsterdam and Rotterdam were an even better comparison in terms of size and distance, and also have a large natural obstacle between them (the Peak District vs the mostly below sea level Dutch province of South Holland). Journey times between the two? Just 1hr 15m at an average speed of 55mph.

Forth’s provocative thread provoked predictable howls of dismay, even anger. Some focused on practical considerations. “It's hilly and the weather is often bad,” they said. “You’re being unreasonable”. Others went further. “You want to build a motorway over the Peak District, the UK’s first National Park?” was the general tone. “Monster.”

Swatting away the brickbats, he made it clear that he wasn’t saying we should build a six lane freeway over Mam Tor or Kinder Scout, just that poor road connections between Sheffield and Manchester were massively holding Sheffield back. “If you're in Sheffield, if you want to fly to the world, if you want to do business globally, you have to fly from Manchester,” he tells me. “So you either have to get that dreadful train or you have to drive.” And if you want to go direct between Sheffield and Manchester, you have to use Snake Pass.

Opened on August 23, 1821, Snake Pass celebrated its 200th birthday two years ago. The Story of the Snake Road and the Sheffield to Glossop Turnpike Trail by local historian Howard Smith details the history of its creation. At the time it was built, one third of the jobs in Sheffield depended on US trade, meaning a road that could get goods to Liverpool quicker was essential. But it didn't take long before people realised it wasn’t really a road meant for winter travel.

“It’s a famous road. It’s an exciting road but in bad weather it’s a dreadful road,” Smith told the Sheffield Telegraph in 2021 (he sadly died earlier this year). “It’s always the first road in the country to be closed at the first sign of snow. When the road was first opened there was terrific excitement and great optimism. Once people travelled in winter it changed.”

As well as being closed a lot, it also has a reputation for being dangerous. Figures from the Department of Transport show that 137 accidents took place on the road between 2014 and 2018. Earlier this year it was even named on a list of the top ten most dangerous roads in the world alongside the notorious North Yungas Road in Bolivia, a 50-mile-long single lane road known as the “Route of Death” due to its 200 hairpin bends and vertical drops of up to 3,000 ft into the Amazon jungle below.