For 30 years Mayer
Hillman has been busily turning conventional political thinking on its head. From road safety to renewable energy, he has come up with solutions that are hard to dismiss. Which is probably why you've never heard of him
Clip this article. Photocopy it, send it to a friend, file it. In 10 years' time, if the person it's about is right (and doubt doesn't figure in his lexicon), you'll be amazed that the views it expresses ever seemed outlandish or unfeasible. What sounds now like wild ecotopian fantasy will have turned into an unexceptionable statute governing daily life.
Mayer Hillman is no self-promoting Jeremiah, nor does he wear a sandwich board, though admittedly he does disdain red (and all other) meat and believe that the end (of the western lifestyle as we know it) is nigh. In fact, he is a radical green social scientist, an exhilaratingly original thinker who generates more energy from his small frame than seems electromagnetically possible.
Hillman is unfazed by polite ridicule: he has met it so often before. Propositions that seemed absurdly unachievable at the time he expounded them are now green commonplaces, if not official policy. As far back as 1972, he was speaking out against the granting of planning permission to hypermarkets and large out-of-town retail stores because of their environmental costs, their detrimental effect on small shops, and the way they discriminated against those without cars. John Gummer, then secretary of s
tate for the environment, ruled against awarding further planning permission for out-of-town shopping centres in 1995. In 1984, Hillman proposed energy audits and thermal ratings for buildings. The Abbey National building society adopted it as policy the following year. I remember him audaciously suggesting, more than 20 years ago, that road intersections should be raised to pavement level to give priority to pedestrians - something local authorities have started to introduce over the past decade. And in 1979, he and Anne Whalley inveighed against the way that national transport data ignored journeys of less than a mile, most of them walking, and concentrated only on private and public motorised transport. Fifteen years later, walking had been added to the official research agenda, in words that might have come straight out of Hillman and Whalley's report. The festschrift of birthday letters published on his 70th birthday last year was aptly entitled Ahead Of Time.
Indeed, so influential has Hillman's thinking been on certain issues that strangers sometimes quote it back at him, oblivious to the fact that he was its originator. Nowhere more so than in the case of children and road safety. Hillman it was (along with John Adams and John Whitelegg) who, in the massively influential 1991 One False Move... A Study Of Children's Independent Mobility, alerted us to the reduction in children's freedom because of the increase in traffic. While in 1971, 80% of seven- and eight-year-old children went to school on their own, by 1990 only 9% were making the journey unaccompanied, with more than four times as many seven- to 11-year-olds being driven in 1990 compared with 20 years earlier.
Hillman doesn't just stand official thinking on its head - he gives it a double somersault and a triple lutz. In One False Move, he revealed that the department of transport's view that the roads are safer because the accident rate has gone down is deeply flawed, in that it measures accidents and not danger. The number of children killed on the roads did indeed fall - from 1,000 in 1971 t
o 400 in 1990 - but that doesn't prove that the roads have become safer. Quite the opposite. Child road deaths have fallen because there aren't many children near them any more. Roads are now such perilous places that fearful parents have dramatically curtailed their children's right to navigate them independently. As a result, parents (for which read - mostly - mothers) have taken to driving them, thereby putting more cars on the road, and so increasing the danger - as well as maternal exhaustion. (While this latter won't perturb governments unduly, they may be exercised by the fact that escorting kids took up 900 million hours in 1990 - and has surely risen exponentially since then - annually costing the economy some £20bn.)
It is counter-intuitive, danger, so he's thought up all kinds of frisky ways of getting people to understand it. Name the safest form of transport, he commands. You footle around until he comes up with the answer, which is a heavy lorry, because if you're driving one you're unlikely to be killed in a crash. Now name the most dangerous. Answer: again a heavy lorry, because if one hit Hillman recognises, to say that you can't use accidents as a measure ofs you, you're pretty sure to be killed. The lorry is safe or dangerous depending on whose point of view you choose, the driver's or that of another road user. So instead of rates of accidents, Hillman wants us to use the language of vulnerability.
His take on "stranger danger" is also fresh. "Far more people are killed by strangers behind the steering wheel of a motor vehicle than are killed by strangers on foot. Danger should be removed from children rather than children from danger." In reality, the opposite is happening, with vulnerable road users such as children affected by the so-called "improved" performance of cars, which enables drivers to accelerate to higher speeds in fewer seconds.
Down the years, Hillman has charted the vast repercussions of the growth of motorised transport. "Normal carelessness in children is now considered blame-worthy. And though the outdoor environment contains experience, learning opportunities and stimuli that are crucial to children's understanding of the real world, it's now out of bounds to them until they reach an increasingly advanced age in their childhood. It's salutary that, when children do obtain parental 'licence' to travel on their own, there are fewer outdoor and public spaces for their social and recreational activity owing to the appropriation of streets for traffic."
He makes a shocking analogy. "Children's lives have been evolving in a way that mirrors the characteristics of the lives of criminals in prison. They, too, have a roof over their heads, regular meals and entertainment provided for them, but they are not free to go out. But children are not criminals."
The "battery" lives he describes today's children as living are in clear contrast to his own free-range childhood. Born to Scottish Jewish parents in West Hampstead, London, Hillman and his two older brothers, Harold and Ellis (the three of them born inside two-and-three-quarter years), were often "left to our own devices, including getting up to mischief - it was a phenomenal education".
Among the boys' capers was putting a stainless-steel thermometer with gunpowder under a candle in a dustbin and withdrawing to safety to count how many neighbours' lights came on after the inevitable blow-up. "We learned at first hand about danger by experimenting at an early age. We didn't harm anyone - we learned the meaning of taking risks and its consequences, something that is increasingly denied this generation of children. They'll therefore be at more risk later, because they have no experience to fall back on, no coping mechanisms that they've developed through slight accidents and injuries."
In 1939, the boys were evacuated to Rickmansworth. "The evacuation officer tried to find a family that would take the three of us. I remember the shaking of heads as he went with us from home to home. No one would take us all and at seven I was lodged with a gentile family on my own where - because we were kosher - I had to say, 'I'm sorry, but I can't eat your fish or your meat.' None of the households we were in liked us at all."
Bombs in London notwithstanding, Hillman père insisted that his boys come home for the Sabbath, so on Fridays they left school early, walked the one-and-half miles to Rickmansworth station, where they took the Metropolitan line to Finchley Road station, and then walked home. On Sunday evenings, they returned to Rickmansworth. Hillman shimmers as he recalls the opportunities for mischief-making afforded by those journeys, but after two years the trio insisted on coming back home. Father assented but, adamant that they weren't going to spoil their education, insisted that they stay on at the Rickmansworth school. So from 1941-1945, they did the same journey in reverse, getting up at 6.30am, making their own sandwiches, and walking to the station.
Given Hillman's personal experience, along with his work on the effects of traffic, you gird yourself for a homily about the virtues of public transport (like a low-fat diet, high on the yeah, yeah scale). He doesn't deliver. On the contrary, he points out that, per passenger mile, public transport is only 20% less energy-intensive than travelling in a car. The bicycle is his panacea, and his adult life has witnessed a dramatic decline in its use. Fifty years ago, cycle mileage exceeded car mileage. Now it's the other way around. While most children own a bicycle, few are allowed to use it as a means of transport, which Hillman finds deplorable, because cycling - when it's used as a daily means of transport - is not only a terrific way of keeping fit, but also makes the world more accessible to children. Compared with walking, bicycling has the potential to expand a person's geographical catchment area 10- to 15-fold.
Hillman insists that a latent demand for cycling exists. The great deterrent is the speed of traffic. Those who regard current trends as immutable should look at the Danish experience.
In the early 1970s, Denmark had the highest rate of child mortality from traffic accidents in western Europe. A new Danish road traffic act in 1976 made it the police and traffic authority's responsibility, in consultation with schools, to protect children from traffic on their way to and from school. They created a network of traffic-free foot and cycle paths, established low-speed areas, narrowed roads and introduced traffic islands. Accidents fell by 85%. In Denmark, more than 20% of all journeys are made by bicycle, compared with fewer than 3% in Britain. Partly this is because a Danish cyclist is 10 times safer than their British counterpart, even though Denmark has a higher level of car ownership than Britain.
Hillman is a patron of Sustrans, which is on track to completing a 10,000-mile national cycle network by 2005, and he himself is a familiar figure cycling around north London on his 20-year-old bike. He doesn't wear a helmet - indeed, one of his most iconoclastic pieces of work made the case against them. Typically, it challenged official statistics on account not of their accuracy but of their relevance. Until his study in 1993, the road safety orthodoxy was that wearing a helmet made you safer. Hillman discovered, though, that most fatalities and serious injuries to cyclists occur not when they fall off their bikes through losing control (which causes minor injuries that a helmet can slightly protect against), but through collision with a motor vehicle. And here a helmet is of very limited value.What's more, the road safety campaig
ners and helmet manufacturers pushing helmet use assume that cycling behaviour is unaffected by the wearing of one. Wrong, says Hillman. The helmet-wearing cyclist feels less vulnerable and therefore bikes less cautiously, taking marginally more risks. Helmet use, argues Hillman, can expose a cyclist to greater danger by inflating their idea of its protective properties. "Cyclists rarely ride into motor vehicles. Calling on cyclists to increase their safety by wearing a helmet shifts responsibility away from drivers, the agents of danger, on to cyclists, who are nearly always the victims. Were cycle helmets to be made compulsory, it would encourage the view that cyclists are responsible for their own injury."
Hillman has helped change official attitudes to cycling. Before 1992, the government was reluctant to promote it because of concerns about cycling casualties and the consequences of air pollution. The report that he wrote in that year, Cycling: Towards Health And Safety, published in the name of the British Medical Association, was the first to emphasise the health benefits of cycling. Based on actuarial figures, he compared the loss of "life years" through cycle accidents with the gain in "life years" through the improved fitness of regular cyclists, and came up with the remarkable ratio of 20:1. In other words, for every life year lost through accidents, 20 are gained through improved health and fitness.
Hillman has made the bold claim that cycling improves mental health, too, arguing that cyclists have a general sense of self-esteem and achievement from having arrived somewhere entirely through their own efforts. He has also been outspoken on the subject of the school run, criticising the admissions policies of private schools for ignoring how far away from the school a child lives. Hillman has calculated that parents' chauffeuring a child living three miles from school to and from it for five years amounts to 10,000 extra vehicle miles. "No longer," he contends, "can it be considered acceptable for this freedom to be exercised in isolation from its wider social, environmental and health repercussions. Parents may be prepared, for the sake of their children's education, to drive them to school for four or five years, but they're ignoring the impact of that decision on the health and quality of life of people living along the route that they'll take."
Though all Hillman's work is concerned with transport, health and environmental issues, it brings together an enormous number of different aspects, and is always innovative and solution-oriented. After coming upon a dead body in a motorcycle crash 25 years ago, and seeing that a few hours later all record of it had been obliterated from the site, he proposed roadside plaques with the time and place of death as a jolting reminder of otherwise routine carnage. (He is a patron of RoadPeace, the charity for road traffic victims formed 10 years ago.) Objecting to the "polluter pays" principle - "If the polluter has paid, their conscience is clear: they feel they've paid for their pollution and can continue polluting" - he coined an alternative "conserver gains" principle, arguing that governments should reward individuals and companies who adopt practices that don't adversely affect society or the environment. And when, 30 years ago, Hillman noticed that 80% of car exhausts were positioned on the left side of vehicles, thereby discharging their fumes towards pedestrians, he tried to persuade car manufacturers to move them to the other side. None of these solutions, alas, was taken up, this last because overseas sales were more valued than pedestrian health.
Hillman today still lives in Hampstead - he says that he's moved the equivalent of 1.34 inches a day to get there from his birthplace 70 years ago. It's just as easy to track his present preoccupations back to his early life. His father David, an orthodox Jew and son of a rabbi who had fled the pogroms in Lithuania as a child to settle with his family in Glasgow, was a portrait painter and stained-glass artist, but had few commissions until late in his life. Oppressively authoritarian, he required his children to do his bidding and brooked no dissent. As a consequence, all three came to challenge authority and Mayer counts himself a "militant atheist", though feels very Jewish and is proud of his origins.
Yet David Hillman also bequeathed his sons an almost Puritan sense of duty. "He said to us, 'You want to live your life so that, when you're dying, you can feel that the world has benefited from your existence.'" In fact, it was Hillman's mother, rather more than his father, who actually lived that precept. As well as her 24/7 work as a GP in a single-handed inner-city practice, Annie Hillman shopped, cooked, washed up and drove herself generally so hard that she died after a series of heart attacks in 1967, aged 66. Neither parent, remarks Mayer, "ever took us to the cinema, theatre, concert or the park, because they were so busy with their own lives. Mother didn't have the time to do those things and Father didn't have the inclination."
At the age of 11, Mayer decided to become an architect. At 22, within three months of qualifying from the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, he became a partner in a newly-established north London firm of architects. His work featured in architectural magazines, and embodied the precision and lack of waste he'd cherished since childhood when, in the school holidays, he'd plot his mother's daily route to her patients' homes so as to minimise travel time. (Today, Hillman can't cycle past a skip without stopping to see if it contains something he can make use of. His roof space is stowed with screws, wood, plastic, washers and taps he's squirrelled.)
In 1964, he married Heidi Krott, who'd come to England from Vienna in 1938, aged one, in her refugee mother's arms. The next year, aged 33, after reading Colin Buchanan's seminal report, Traffic In Towns, and violently disagreeing with its recommendations, Hillman decided to switch profession. Though his ideas were too controversial and radical to secure a grant, he embarked on a doctorate at Edinburgh University, examining the social and environmental aspects of personal mobility. This period also saw the emergence of his own "hurry sickness", the frenzied rush that so much of his work has critiqued. Hillman may have been ahead of time professionally, but personally, for decades, he's been chasing it. Heidi, meanwhile, possessed not only equal parts beauty, ability and modesty, but also the high exasperation threshold essential for the role of Mayer's wife. For Hillman - generous and frugal, warm and vibrant, with an ability to laugh at himself and quick to tears - is also a man so hyper-busy and garrulous that it sometimes seems as if only physical or chemical measures might stop him.
The birth of their two sons, Josh and Saul, did little to modify him. Indeed, when it came to his own children, Mayer modelled his mother rather than father. "I was so work-obsessed that I can't remember when I read the kids a bedtime story, because I had more important things - in my view - to do," he says candidly. "How can you say to yourself reading about Moppit is more important than delivering an article of high quality that's hopefully going to influence policy thinking, especially when you realise that someone else can do the Moppit reading? I feel I've missed out and my kids have missed out."
Heidi, a former journalist, is appalled by this admission: "Though Mayer may seldom have read them bedtime stories, he did many other things with them and was very involved in their upbringing. He certainly wasn't a detached father, and they feel that." Indeed, the boys write warmly of him in their preface to Ahead Of Time, and Hillman concedes that "our relationship is very different from the one I had with my father - they're delightfully irreverent". Influenced, too, just as he was, by his father's exhortation to make a difference: Josh, 34, is head of education policy at the BBC and Saul, 32, is a researcher on child development at the Anna Freud Centre.
So why isn't Mayer Hillman better known? The media love a provocative doomster, and his ability to popularise is evident in his writing's demotic titles and epigrams (such as "Careless policies for carless people" and "Whistling in the greenhouse gaslight"). Partly, I guess, it's because his work, though prolific and based on solid analysis, as well as on ingenious research and original ideas, has usually taken t
he form of quasi-academic reports, mainly published by the independent social science Policy Studies Institute, which has been his research base for 32 years and where he's now senior fellow emeritus. In that world, he's an admired and influential figure. As the social innovator, the late Michael Young, said, "Most of us were talkers; Mayer was the doer." Tim Lang, professor of food policy at Thames Valley University, has described him as "an inspiration to my generation of public policy thinkers. Quite simply, he has been one of the pioneers of the late 20th century in developing integrated policy thinking and planning."
Another reason, I suspect, for Hillman's relative lack of public renown is the fact that his interests range so widely, making him hard to pigeonhole. In addition to his work on transport, for instance, he also co-authored (with Paul Elkins and Robert Hutchison) an atlas of green economics, and I haven't yet referred to his research on the costs and benefits of putting the clocks forward by one hour throughout the year (which led to a campaign), largely because my eyes glaze over at the very mention of it, though Hillman has tried to persuade me that it's of the same order of importance as his other causes. The additional hour of evening sunlight every day would, according to his research, reduce road accidents, harmonise our clocks with continental ones, save electricity and, by increasing the time available for leisure and social activities, enormously enhance the health and quality of life of nearly everyone.
Linking all these diverse preoccupations is what Hillman calls "the equity argument". As fellow researcher and activist Stephen Plowden put it, "You have always been interested in the fate of people left behind by 'progress'." Hillman expresses it succinctly: "I abhor exploitation" - a feeling that originated, he readily admits, in being the youngest of three children and the sense that he was being denied his turn.
His current preoccupation is with the social implications of climate change, and here Hillman's conclusions are so dramatic, so jumbo in their tentacles, that they'll probably propel him into prominence. His trigger is the Contraction And Convergence campaign devised by Aubrey Meyer, founder director of the independent Global Commons Institute (GCI). This has charted the vast reduction of carbon emissions required of the western world (that's the contraction bit) in order to equalise it with the rest of the world (the convergence) to avert climate catastrophe and protect the global commons - a process nothing less than "equity for survival". Their calculations make Kyoto look like trying to end a drought with a watering can.
GCI believes that Contraction And Convergence is the only way of resolving the most critical problem that mankind has had to face, and political representatives of both developed and developing countries are reluctantly coming to the same stark realisation.
According to Hillman, our carbon emissions will need to be cut by 10% each and every year for a 25-year period to bring convergence between rich and poor nations. Hillman believes that no sector will feel the impact more than transport. This is how it would work. Each of us will be allocated an annual fuel allowance, and every time you buy a product or service with a significant energy component - whether paying a gas bill or buying an airline ticket - it will be deducted from your annual account.
There will be trading, of course. If you're clever or frugal, you'll be able sell your surplus fuel coupons on the open market to those willing to buy them. And there'll be takers, since a return flight from London to Florida will consume double the annual fossil fuel ration that 
each person presently living on the planet can be allowed. Says Hillman, a delightful blend of the libertarian and the interventionist, "You want to fly to America? Fly to America, but you'll be bloody cold for the next couple of years because you'll have run out of coupons."
He's hardly finished talking before I'm in with the objections. How will it ever be implemented? His vision is surely absurdly voluntaristic, as if rich countries and greedy transnationals will simply relinquish their advantages in a grand altruistic gesture for the abstract good of the planet. Where's the politics? Where's the realism? Who will police it on the personal, corporate and international level?
Hillman is undaunted. "I call this carbon rationing because I deliberately want those connotations. When there was a shortage of food in this country during the last war, people didn't say, 'The poor will just have to starve' - it was agreed that the only fair solution was to share it. I'm totally convinced that the same thing will be introduced with fuel over the next 10 years. Increasingly, we'll witness calamitous events, like when the city of York flooded. If it happens once, people think it's a freak event, but when it happens twice or three times, people will begin to sit up. Already in some southern states of the US, people are finding it difficult to insure themselves against hurricanes."
Hillman professes himself confident that the US will eventually sign Kyoto because September 11 signalled a realisation that the rest of the world impacts upon them. He makes an analogy with apartheid and South Africa refusing to heed international protests until world pressure became irresistible.
"People say technology will solve the problem, for instance, by making more efficient use of fuel, and I say no - if you don't reduce demand first, then by making it more efficient you'll increase demand for it. If you get more miles from the gallon, then you're lowering the cost of travel and effectively promoting it. You've got to reduce demand before you go down the efficiency and renewable energy route, and you reduce demand by rationing. At the start of the war, you didn't have the Tories saying we have to go to war against fascism, and the Labour party saying elect us, we won't go to war against fascism. There was a recognition that there was a joint enemy."
The implications are colossal. Cycling would come into its own. Hillman predicts that the day will come when people in the street will feel sorry for someone passing in a car: it will be a sign of an emergency requiring them to use up a precious part of their annual carbon quota. Bye-bye globalisation and supermarkets (not only couldn't we drive to them regularly, we 
also couldn't afford foods or other globally traded products that had themselves travelled so far), hello again corner shops and local produce. This is socialism via environmentalism. Will the planet turn out to have been our greatest revolutionary?
"We have no moral right to leave a legacy of damage to the planet. Our children and grandchildren will ask us what we did to prevent global catastrophe." Hillman knows that he'll be accused of exaggerating the risks but maintains, "Governments already realise that they have to deliver their share of reduction. It's a finite amount that the planet can absorb, so you have to set that as your limit, then work out how to get there. Your instinct will be to find fault with these statements. If you don't think these solutions will work, there's an obligation on you to think up a better one. So often, ideas are rejected on the grounds that they are not perfect in all respects, in favour of the status quo, which is far more imperfect."
As with many crusaders, Hillman's impatience - "I'm increasingly frustrated as I get older at not being able to persuade people to think as I do" - is tempered by his certainty: "I know from experience that ideas need to be floated and then get taken up. I'm not deterred by rejection."
Critical of green campaigners who jet around the world, he himself has flown only once in seven years. In the past 18 months, he's opened three conferences - one in New Zealand and two in Australia - by satellite link-up or pre-recorded cassette. When he gave a paper on climate change last year in Scotland at VeloCity, an annual international conference on the role of cycling in transport futures, he ended with a sting, arguing that international conferences that entail long travel across the globe such as that one could no longer be justified. He was met by impenetrable silence and much studying of shoelaces. He and Heidi have an old Citroën 16 in which they've driven 150 miles so far this year. Yet still he exceeds the carbon ration he expects to be allocated, and says that they ought to consider sharing their family home with others because, despite its solar panels and low heating levels, it now accommodates only the
two of them.
Mayer's brother Ellis was president of the Flat Earth Society - not because he thought the earth was flat, but because he believed that conventional wisdom should always be challenged. Freethinking Mayer clearly subscribes to this, too. If he has his way, in a decade or thereabouts, so shall we all.
Written by Anne Karpf - first appeared in Saturday November 2, 2002 - The Guardian
Yes that's me hanging with the Simpson's - well sort of - it has become the photo shoot opportunity down at the local Bijou - so who am I to argue I am no different to everyone else - they could ha
ve paid me a bit more attention is about all . . lol.
PhD studentship and how I saw it unfolding . . . we spoke for about almost 2 hours - it is structured slightly differently in some ways - it is Games-Based Learning which is something I am very interested in - so hope to hear something by the end of the week . . .
be easier to read as I have been reacquainted with all the characters again . . . so that was good. (this is where the Simpson's Kodak moment was - as well as the view from the 6th floor . . . just Glasgow - East side . . . cartoons courtesy of Zapiro - Mail & Guardian
y different approach for the next few weeks - which I think I need as the Literature Review was getting to me - it is tons of reading and editing and reading and editing etc., . . . also looks as if I will need to cut down on the length as it is far too long - so for next week its Criteria need to have that sorted before continuing . . . any further.
beleaguered first-time buyers that prices have risen in the time it takes to walk from one estate agent's window to the next. Already, half rely on financial support from family or friends to get that first foot on the ladder.
Iraq of course play South Korea on 25 July . . . I hope they contain themselves after the match.
