Easy access to the hills is good. But should it be at the expense of the environment? Guy Keating, BMC Access and Conservation Officer takes a look at the proposed Woodhead Pass bypass in the Peak District.
The impact currently caused by traffic on the Woodhead Pass (A628) is appalling. It’s a basic trans-Pennine “A” road in the northern Peak District, yet it has become the freight “route of choice” between the eastern industrial centres of Barnsley, Rotherham, and Sheffield into Manchester - in effect a very slow two-lane motorway. A constant stream of 40-foot lorries and cars continually grind past peoples’ doorsteps causing fatal accidents, congestion, and pollution.
Something needs to be done that’s for sure, but currently the only solution on offer from the Highway’s Agency is a 5.7km long bypass around the towns of Mottram and Tintwistle, for a cool price tag of £110 million. This would be a “motorway-style” road complete with concrete viaducts, roundabouts, lay-bys, lighting, signs and traffic lights, all slicing straight across the rolling countryside of Longdendale into the National Park.
Access to the local countryside would be severely compromised. Local people would be cut off from the peaceful, green hills, and walkers using the Trans-Pennine trail and Pennine Way would have to cross a new, noisy road. Once tranquil haunts would be no more. Swallows Wood nature reserve would be crossed by an 84-foot high concrete viaduct, and the bypass would also destroy badger and bat habitats, heather moorland, and the 100 year-old Mottram showground. And of course, lets not forget the climbing - both Harry’s and John Henry’s Quarries would be blasted into the annals of history.
But, I’m sure you’re all privately thinking, this is all very well, but if it saves a few minutes journey time, then perhaps it’s worth it anyway. Well, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but any quickening of journey time will be fleeting at the most. Hauliers and others will be the first to exploit this new smoother flowing section of road, and you’ll be right back where you started - stuck in a queue. The Highways Agency estimate that on opening in 2010 there would be an almost immediate 84% increase in traffic, from 10,500 vehicles/day to 19,300 vehicles/day, increasing to a predicted monumental 23,300 vehicles/day by 2025. And at these levels, the pressure would really be on to develop the whole road into a fully-fledged six-lane motorway.
The BMC is objecting to the scheme on the grounds that it is ill-thought out, destroys climbing areas, makes a mockery of the status of a National Park, and most importantly, there is an alternative. The Friends of the Peak District have researched a proposal, entitled “Way To Go”. This is a series of sustainable transport measures, supported by the Government, that suggests avoiding building a bypass altogether. Its central ethos is implementing a series of weight restrictions to divert freight traffic off the trans-Pennine “A” roads and back onto the M1, M62, and M60 motorway network. Then in the longer term, freight should be transferred to rail - the Longdendale rail line from Sheffield to Manchester could be brought back into service with container freight depots at each end. The proposal is fully endorsed by an independent transport professional at the Metropolitan Transport Research Unit.
Others are against the scheme too. The Peak National Park has rejected the proposal, a decision supported by the Council for National Parks (CNP). Ruth Chambers, CNP’s Head of Policy said, “We fully support the decision by the National Park Authority to object to this proposal which will not only damage the National Park, but will create more problems than those it is seeking to solve. This resounding rejection by the statutory guardians of the Peak District should send the Highways Agency back to the drawing board to find a solution to the traffic congestion in the villages of Mottram, Tintwistle and Hollingworth that does not create equally bad, if not worse, problems elsewhere. ”
This short-term, piecemeal proposal will not provide the required long-term solution. It’s time that proper, integrated, sustainable alternatives for moving freight across the Pennines are investigated.
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