The media is crying into its morning tea because the A57 Snake Pass is closing again. From June 15 to July 3, Derbyshire County Council will lock the gates between Ladybower Reservoir and Glossop for "essential ground investigations" at Doctor’s Gate. The standard commuter reaction is a mix of rage and despair. Competitor outlets are running the predictable, lazy narrative: Drivers face disruption, businesses will suffer, we must fix this vital economic artery.
It is a comforting story. It is also entirely wrong. For another perspective, read: this related article.
Stop treating the Snake Pass like a normal road. It is not an artery; it is a geological liability. The obsession with keeping this strip of asphalt open to daily cross-Pennine traffic is a masterclass in the sunk cost fallacy. We do not need a permanent engineering fix for the Snake Pass. We need to accept reality, close it to commuter traffic permanently, and turn the region's biggest transport headache into its greatest asset.
The Myth of the Vital Artery
Every time a heavy downpour causes another landslip, local politicians roll out the same script. They talk about "restoring resilience" and "securing long-term funding." They point to the 30,000 vehicles using it weekly as proof of its necessity. Related insight on the subject has been published by National Geographic Travel.
Let us look at the actual mechanics of the geography. The Snake Pass is a nineteenth-century turnpike hacked into unstable, shifting shale beds at an altitude of nearly 1,700 feet. It features four active landslip sites. It has a permanent 7.5-tonne weight restriction because the ground literally cannot support modern commercial transport. It is currently choked by two sets of temporary traffic lights just to keep vehicles from tumbling down a hillside at Doctor’s Gate and Alport.
I have watched local authorities throw millions at this hillside for over two decades. In the 1970s, engineers packed it with rock fill. It sank. In 2008, Cowms Moor slipped. They patched it. It sank again. Now, repair estimates for the Alport site alone are scaling into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Pouring public money into stabilizing the A57 is the civil engineering equivalent of trying to build a sandcastle on a rising tide. The underlying geology is actively moving. You cannot engineer your way out of a mountain that wants to lie down in the valley.
The Cost of the Commuter Obsession
Why are we fighting nature to save a route that fails every single winter? The Woodhead Pass (A628) sits just to the north. It is lower, wider, and designed to handle heavy freight. The M62 sits above that. The Snake Pass is already explicitly bypassed on major highway signage for a reason: it is an atrocious commuter road.
By pretending it is a viable trunk road, we create three distinct problems:
- Financial Black Hole: Millions spent on temporary patches are millions stolen from urban pothole repair and local bus subsidies.
- The Safety Trap: Between 2018 and 2023, this 23-mile stretch saw 5 fatalities and 62 serious injuries. The government is preparing to dump £7.6 million into average speed cameras and anti-skid surfaces to fix a problem caused entirely by the road's inherent design.
- Environmental Degradation: Forcing thousands of braking, accelerating commuter cars through a fragile Peak District ecosystem increases emissions and heightens wildfire risks, like the massive 340-hectare blaze that scorched the summit just weeks ago.
Imagine a scenario where a private logistics company owned this road. They would have closed it a decade ago. The return on investment for maintaining a two-lane mountain track that drops into the abyss every time it rains is strictly negative.
The De-Asphalting Strategy
The solution is radical, counter-intuitive, and entirely practical. We must stop trying to fix the road for cars. Instead, we should officially decommission the central 10-mile stretch between Ladybower and Glossop as a public highway.
Ban private motor vehicles permanently. Hand the road over exclusively to cyclists, walkers, and the emergency services.
When the council closed the pass to cars during previous landslip investigations, something extraordinary happened. Cyclists flocked to it from Manchester and Sheffield. It became an open-air velodrome, a world-class tourism draw, and a safe, vehicle-free haven through the heart of the national park.
The route is already scheduled to feature in the women’s Tour de France next year. The council admits a permanent road repair will not be ready by then, yet they are bending over backwards to create a temporary fix just to let cars back on it afterward. Why?
If you transform the Snake Pass into Western Europe's premier car-free Alpine-style cycling climb, the economic profile changes completely. You replace angry, gridlocked commuters who contribute nothing to the local economy with high-spending cycle tourists, hikers, and weekend visitors who spend money in Glossop, Hope Valley, and Sheffield. You eliminate the need for hundreds of millions in structural retaining walls. A cycling and walking path does not require a 7.5-tonne load capacity. It does not require massive engineering interventions when the shale shifts a few inches. It requires basic, low-cost maintenance.
The Counter-Argument: What About the Locals?
The immediate pushback is obvious: What about the residents of Glossop and the surrounding hamlets? Won't this isolate them?
Let us be brutally honest. Anyone driving from Glossop to Sheffield via the Snake Pass on a daily basis is playing roulette with their calendar. Between snow closures, landslips, and agricultural delays, it is the least reliable commute in England. The Woodhead Pass adds a mere ten minutes to the journey under normal conditions and offers a far more stable route.
For local farmers and access to existing properties, the road can remain open on a "permit-only, local access" basis, managed easily with ANPR cameras at both ends. This keeps the economic life of the immediate valley alive without inviting the daily onslaught of cross-Pennine traffic.
We are trapped in a mindset that dictates every piece of tarmac laid down by our ancestors must be preserved for passenger cars until the end of time. It is a failure of imagination. The upcoming two-week closure is not a crisis to be managed. It is a preview of what the Peak District could look like if we had the courage to stop fighting a losing battle against geology.
Close the road. Save the taxpayers hundreds of millions. Give the Peak District back to the people who actually want to experience it, rather than the drivers who just want to blast through it. Turn off the temporary traffic lights, cancel the retaining walls, and let the mountain win.
