If you often travel between Sheffield and Manchester by road, you'll know the journey can be long and winding – sometimes even painfully so. Though the scenery of the Peak District is thrilling, the overall experience is more often a grinding bore. It turns out it's possible to lose your appreciation for "God's own country" when you've spent an hour or more stuck behind a lorry in Mottram-in-Longdendale.
The reasons this trip is so torturous are no mystery. The two passes available to motorists through the Peak District – Snake and Woodhead – are single-lane in both directions, which makes bottlenecks inevitable. To make matters worse, they're also usually closed for several months each year, mostly due to landslides but sometimes thanks to snow, ice or (as the Woodhead Pass is at the moment) wildfires.
For years, people have argued there must be a more efficient way to connect traffic between these two cities. The journey to find it, however, has been almost as meandering as passes themselves.
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