I have read the Snowdonia Green Key Strategy document (SGKS) and I should like to comment on it. I see that the document is dated August 2001. Will you tell me what effective means have been used to make it available to the general public and when those means were first put into effect? I also see that, for the moment, it is endorsed by a consortium of interested bodies. Is Gwynedd Council to be the democratically elected authority that would make itself answerable for the implementation of the SGKS proposals? 

I share the SGKS objective of a re-invigorated and prosperous Snowdonia economy but in my view, far from being likely to realise this, SGKS has set out a course for disaster. I welcome the idea of a greatly strengthened public transport system but reject the SGKS’s use of coercion to achieve it. The central effect of a two-hour parking limit in Snowdonia would be to turn its cliffs and summits into a prohibited zone for anyone who had arrived by car. Very Bad News. 

At one point (p.5, 5.5) SGKS envisages that, ‘The publicity surrounding this whole Initiative’ will ‘allow more areas to attract visitors’. Not for a moment does it entertain the opposite idea, that media coverage might be unfavourable and its effect repellent (come to Snowdonia for your holidays – and be embroiled in controversy). Yet, so far (in a relatively minor way when compared with what could come) the publicity SGKS has received has been bad. It has been alarmed and angry. It should be an urgent matter to inquire into why this has been so, before further damage is done to confidence in the Welsh tourist industry. 

Others have – fairly, I think – cast doubt on SGKS’s bona fides as a consultative document (p.6, 5.11; p.23, 12.1) finding its promises of modification and revision merely emollient when parking places at Pen y Pass have already been removed and SGKS itself confirms that (p.23, 10.1) ‘projects are already being implemented.’ It purports to have the interests of all visitors to Snowdonia at heart but, in fact, it would penalise (no place for canoes on this bus, you know: you’ll have to go and canoe somewhere else). It is indeed a topsy turvy way of going about things to tell people what is good for them and only then to embark (p.17) on ‘an appraisal of visitor and local needs and/or expectations.’ 

Damned Cars. SGKS declares (p.2, 2:2 & 2.3) that, in Snowdonia, ‘Expenditure per individual is not substantial’ and that, ‘Part of the reason for this is that 92% of visitors arrive by private motor car.’ Who says that this is ‘part of the reason’? On what basis? How large – or how small – a part is private transport of ‘the reason’? It is astonishing that this, the core contention of the writers and the pivot on which the thinking of the Snowdonia Green Key Strategy turns, is baldly stated without any justifying evidence or supporting reasoning. Let’s test it. Do visitors to the prosperous parts of the Lake District arrive mostly by train? Does the Eden Project (so successful that it sometimes advises people to stay away) have no car parking facilities? 

Plainly, cars facilitate the purchase of large, expensive items such as down sleeping bags and high-performance tents. If expenditure per individual is, always and for everyone, ‘not substantial’, what keeps Snowdonia’s outdoor equipment shops in business? Have the authors of SGKS not seen the price of a Goretex jacket? 

It might be hoped that, at the very least, a serious document would provide factual information about the different purchasing patterns of different types of visitors. But not a bit of it. Common sense might have proposed that it would be sightseers who would be better served by buses while those whose outdoor interests are exposed to the uncertainties of time and the weather needed a mobile base, but no. Settled in its preconceptions, SGKS goes on to favour ‘casual visitors’ with two-hour parking opportunities at the expense of the longer-term-parking needs of climbers and hill-walkers and canoeists and anglers. Why so? Well, reversing the truth, SGKS thinks that casual visitors represent a better economic bet and this will (p.3, 4.5) ‘maximise business opportunities for local enterprises’. This is fantasy. Are its authors thinking of ice-cream vans? For, otherwise, unless you spoil Snowdonia’s rugged grandeur, there are no business opportunities under Clogwyn y Grochan or at the foot of the Milestone Buttress. 

The Lake District comparison SGKS itself makes the Lake District comparison but without drawing Lake District lessons. It laments (p.2, 2.2) that, ‘The economic returns to the local community from … visitor use is… relatively low, less for example per visitor, than in the Lake District,’ but did it never occur to the authors that this might be because there is less to spend money on in Snowdonia? What follows is not an exhaustive list but it is accurate enough as a specimen to be illustrative: on a road-journey from Bethesda to Llanberis via Capel Curig a visitor would be served by a sometimes-open refreshment stall at Ogwen (no seating), some good outdoor equipment shops and a most welcome General Store and café at Capel, a famous pub (The Pen y Gwryd), a sometimes-open café at Pen-y-Pass, another mountain pub (The Vaynol Arms). This is slender provision for a 52-weeks-of-the-year, fair-weather-and-foul tourist industry! 

Similarly, 6.6 million visitor days a year (p.2, 2.2) is the fragile base from which the new and reckless strategy is proposed to be launched. That 6.6 needs careful nurturing not rough treatment for, if high volumes are to be sought, it compares very poorly with published figures of 22 million for the Lake District and 25 million for the Peak District – areas where the achievement of these figures has NOT required the oppressive SGKS measures. Two things seem to me to be certain. Firstly, as in the Lake District, it will be those in big boots and wet anoraks who come throughout the year (not summer-only visitors) who will constitute the core of a 52-weeks season and, secondly, all the coercion in the world will not turn Bethesda into Ambleside. 

A pioneering and innovative scheme? – The Nottingham experience. SGKS sees itself as ‘pioneering and innovative’ (p.1, 1.1). Well, perhaps not so pioneering. Perhaps, familiar. In the early 1970s something similar, a Zone and Collar scheme, was tried in the city of Nottingham. It, too – as does SGKS – envisaged throwing a cordon around a heartland within which use of the motor car would be discouraged. It, too, required gateway park and ride schemes; and, to encourage the use of these, specially purchased luxury coaches called Lilac Leopards would run regular services to the city centre (bus lanes, traffic lights ‘weighted’ against cars, and pedestrian zones were other features of the plan). What was striking to those of us for whom such radicalism was appealing then was the speed with which the Lilac Leopards were sold off. Mostly, they ran about empty, and an empty bus is a very bad advertisement. It is an immediate indicator of how wrong things are going. 

So wide would be the differences in levels of demand in Snowdonia that it is reasonable to suppose that any available fleet of Sherpa buses would be completely unable to cope at peak periods but most of the time would run about empty. Do you think that empty Sherpas will avoid transmitting those powerful messages: ‘UNPOPULAR’ ‘LOSS-MAKING’? For how long will the SGKS consortium be able to run a loss-making transport system? Aside from (p.5, 5.2) Newidiem’s hazy ‘in the region of £7 and £9 million’ for capital expenditure, what projections and costings have been done? If/when the Sherpa system collapses, what would replace it, given that, by then, facilities for the private car would have been severely curtailed? 

A gain of 170 jobs (p.5, 5.4) is the most secure prediction in SGKS. What projections of job losses have been made, should it all go horribly wrong? Just think what could be done for Snowdonia with £9 million and the unspecified ‘further’ amounts, if these sums weren’t being poured away on wishful experiments. Personally, I am pleased to say that the voluntary park-and-ride elements (along with the bus lanes and pedestrian zones) of the original Nottingham plan have survived. Happily, of the compulsory Collar there is no sight. We may have got closer now to where the originators of that scheme might have wished to get; but it has taken thirty years, not the implementation five (p.1, 1.3) of the SGKS. Moreover, this is with a massive population base (greater Nottingham alone has 350,000 people). 

Including the designated ‘gateway’ towns, what is the population of Snowdonia? On any day at the most popular times of the year, by how many people is this number augmented? Concentrating cars in necessarily very large car-parks (hardly an enhancement to the beauty of any town or village), rather than dispersing them as at present, is trying to apply an urban arrangement to a rural area for which it is inappropriate. It would choke up five small towns by obliging them to become holding centres for large numbers of motor vehicles whose owners had gone somewhere else. 

Future prosperity. Llanrwst is not properly a gateway town since anyone entering the core area of Snowdonia through it would subsequently arrive at a further gateway (Betwys y Coed or Bethesda). This is but one example of the unwisdom of imposing bureaucratic identities on five distinct places. It gets in the way of facing up to the special opportunities that each has and of a proper analysis of the obstacles which lie in the way of progress. 

There is a very strong and potentially lucrative need for somewhere to go in bad weather that Snowdonia has yet adequately to meet. The pioneering example of Nevisport in Fort William and – following that example – of Outside in Hathersage shows just how much may be achieved when this challenge is tackled but SGKS misses this when it envisages (p.2 3.2.1) developing ‘ new high quality, tourist facilities and services at a series of inner Gateway towns namely Llanberis, Bethesda, Llanrwst, Betws y Coed, and Porthmadog’ These are facilities, which, in so far as the SNGK feels able to name them, include ( p.3, 4.2) ‘safe parking, toilets, recreational and picnic areas, visitor information provisions etc,’ – not more, in fact, than ones that might be found at a (French) motorway service station. Welcome, popular, necessary they might be, but – to choose the hardest case – they are not, of themselves, going to cause someone to visit a town which is dominated by the gigantic disfigurement of the quarrying of the hill above it and by vast mounds of slate-waste, where shops close and too many properties are for sale. 

With lots of money, time, determination and imagination Bethesda might be recovered and become a lovely place but, in the forty-five years that I have been a mountaineer in Snowdonia, things have only got worse for it. (It had a cinema when I first went there.) How could anyone think that a compulsory bus-service would overturn all that? This alone is novel: that SGKS attempts to use a proposed solution to a claimed traffic problem as a lever to deal with the quite different problem of economic depression. I think that this is one reason that its readers are so deeply suspicious of it, this feeling that it is ready to manipulate them for its own ends which are neither the ends of visitors nor of local people either. What has resulted is stale, shallow, generalised, wishful, lacking detail, a terrible, loose-thinking, muddle of the planning fashions of the last thirty years. 

Traffic problems are the talk of the town; so we’ll have ourselves a traffic problem in this most rural of areas (even if most of the time, Snowdonia’s roads are free-moving and often nearly empty). Cars are anathema to every right-thinking, progressive person; so on a simple two-legs-bad four-legs-good basis we’ll have a down on the car and call this approach ‘green’, regardless of whether or not alternatives might be more polluting. 

Without producing any accident statistics, we’ll say that curtailing car-parking is (p.3, 4.7) a ‘safety’ measure even though we’ve made it perfectly clear that the real reason for doing it is to try to pump more money into towns that sorely need it. Disgruntled outdoor people and other harrassed visitors need only turn to other destinations and stay away from Snowdonia for a year for the damage to some local business to be terminal. 

Again and again, SGKS appears to think that visitors are captives, who have to come, instead of people who are losing patience with stubborn, second-rate thinking and growing increasingly weary of having to fight for their liberties when other areas are opening up. What is urgently needed are some real efforts of the imagination based on deep and solid research that the thousands of friends of Snowdonia can applaud and delight in and that will, indeed, bring the prosperity that we all want for it. 

A very great work of reclamation could begin in Snowdonia, turning old slate rail-lines into cycle tracks, old quarry bays (suitably landscaped and screened) into car parks, old ruins into buildings providing the things that visitors ask for and – creatively – some that they haven’t even conceived of, for, contrary to the SGKS, mountain people and casual visitors alike yearn for somewhere public and shared to go to beyond their hotel rooms, b & bs, climbing huts, tents. The car is one of their means of getting there and, if the visit is worth making, they don’t need to be – and won’t allow themselves to be – forced into it. 

It might well be that the lessons to be learned here are not those of great conurbations but of countries with stronger traditions of alternative transport. In alpine areas, the post-bus; in Turkey,  in north Africa and elsewhere, the grand taxis: different areas have evolved different ways of meeting differing needs and there is no reason why Snowdonia shouldn’t begin to evolve its own distinctive and versatile forms. The key would need to be that the user retained the choice. 

The point is well-made that, in high valleys open to bad weather, enforced inactivity exposes people to physical risk, but lots of people would like the chance to start a walk in one place and finish in another – traverse a mountain, say – if there were a reliable link that didn’t leave them hanging around shivering and miserable; and that wish could be joined with other possibilities. Many French Alpine Club refuges are multi-purpose. They provide overnight accommodation but they also act as restaurants for day visitors and tourists so that they themselves become the destinations for walks. 

Mobile phones are not too reliable in mountain areas so, in addition, such refuges might become a web of contact- and communication-points. If, instead of asking people to tick boxes, the consortium behind SGKS began an ideas enquiry, we might now be involved in something fertile and productive and not an energy-wasting defence of what we hold so dear.

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