Mayer Hillman

Mayer Hillman was born on 30 October 1931 in West Hampstead, north west London. He was the youngest of three sons of David Hillman, an orthodox Jew who had fled pogroms in Lithuania and settled in Glasgow before becoming a portrait painter and stained glass artist in London, and Dr Annie Hillman, a GP. Family and many friends called him Mickey. His brothers were Ellis and Harold.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the three boys were evacuated to homes in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. Their non Jewish hosts offered meat and fish, which the boy from a kosher home politely declined; he stayed vegetarian for life. The brothers came home for the Sabbath each week by train to Finchley Road. After two years their father let them return home on condition that they stayed at the Rickmansworth school, so until the end of the war they made the journey in reverse, rising at 6.30am, making their own sandwiches and walking to the station. Hillman later called this his "free range" childhood and contrasted it with the "battery" lives of children in the 21st century, a theme that ran through his research on children's independent mobility.

Hillman studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, qualifying in architecture in 1954 and in town planning in 1956. After more than a decade in practice he enrolled for a doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, completing in 1970 a thesis titled Mobility in New Towns, which examined the social and environmental aspects of personal mobility and made the case for reducing the need for motorised travel.

At 22 Hillman became a partner in a newly established north London firm of architects and practised in Hampstead for about 13 years. In 1956 he co-designed, for a competition, a prototype for the first pedestrian oriented new town in the UK. The catalyst for his change of profession was Colin Buchanan's 1963 report Traffic in Towns, which accepted rapidly growing car ownership and argued for reshaping cities around it. Hillman disagreed, left architecture in the late 1960s and turned to research.

In 1970 he joined Political and Economic Planning, later the Policy Studies Institute (PSI), and headed its Environment and Quality of Life Research Programme until 1992, when he became Senior Fellow Emeritus. He was on part time secondment to the Transport and Road Research Laboratory from 1973 to 1976 and lectured at the National Police College from 1974 to 1981.

His work repeatedly ran ahead of policy. In 1972 he criticised out of town shopping centres, more than 20 years before planning rules changed. In 1980 he argued against closing branch railway lines. In 1984 he proposed energy audits and thermal ratings for buildings, an idea adopted as energy performance certificates in England and Wales in 2007. In the early 1990s he suggested raising road intersections to pavement level to give pedestrians priority, and he was advocating cycle lanes and 20mph limits more than 40 years before his death.

Walking Is Transport (1979, with Anne Whalley) exposed the omission of short walking journeys from national transport data. One False Move (1990, with John Adams and John Whitelegg) documented the collapse in children travelling to school alone, from 80 percent of seven and eight year olds in 1971 to 9 percent in 1990, and argued that falling child casualties reflected children being removed from the streets, not safer roads. He also calculated that escorting children took 900 million adult hours in 1990.

He gave evidence to many House of Commons select committees, served on advisory groups for the National Consumer Council, Friends of the Earth and Transport 2000, and contributed to Labour Party transport policy groups. His output fell away after 2018, when the PSI closed, but he never formally retired.

From 1990, when he first proposed personal carbon rationing, climate change became the main focus of Hillman's work. Drawing an analogy with the public consensus behind wartime rationing, he argued that an equal annual carbon allowance for every person was the only realistic way to prevent catastrophic warming, and he helped develop the idea of personal carbon allowances. He set out the case in How We Can Save the Planet (2004, with Tina Fawcett), which called climate change "the most serious environmental threat that the world has ever faced", and in The Suicidal Planet (2007, with Tina Fawcett and Sudhir Rajan).

He chaired the Global Commons Trust, was president of the Lifestyle Movement and sat on the Climate and Health Council. He did not fly for decades. By the late 2010s he had concluded that it was too late: in a 2018 Guardian interview with Patrick Barkham he said "We're doomed", called individual action "as good as futile" and announced that he would no longer write or speak on the subject. He still recommended that people should not own cars, should stop flying, eat a plant based diet and limit family size, while doubting that democracies would choose to do so.

In 1964 Hillman married Heidi Krott, who had come to Britain from Vienna in 1939, aged two, as a refugee carried in her mother's arms. They had two sons, Josh, born in 1968, and Saul, born in 1970, and three grandchildren, Jasmine, Eva and Rafi. Heidi died in 2017.

Hillman lived in a converted coach house in London, kept a classic Dawes racing bicycle in the hallway and cycled around London into advanced old age, despite a stroke and a triple heart bypass. He chaired the Netherhall Neighbourhood Association in Hampstead from 1987 to 1999. He was a lifelong vegetarian.

Hillman was proud of his Jewish background yet described himself as a "militant atheist". He believed public policy should be judged by its social and environmental consequences, and especially by its effects on people without cars, on women, on children and on future generations. He insisted that his climate warnings were not opinion but a reading of the data, and he was openly sceptical that technology or carbon capture would rescue humanity. He saw capitalism and the pursuit of economic growth as obstacles to cutting emissions, and argued that accepting the scale of the danger, like a patient accepting a terminal diagnosis, might push people to do more to prolong life rather than less. In 1992 and 1993 he argued against compulsory cycle helmet laws, holding that the health benefits of cycling far outweighed the risks.

Many of Hillman's proposals moved from the margins to the mainstream: 20mph speed limits, cycle lanes, raised junctions that give pedestrians priority, energy performance certificates for homes, the inclusion of walking in national transport statistics and the idea of children's independent mobility as a measure of a healthy city. Road safety campaigners and transport writers described him after his death as highly influential and far ahead of his time. Journalist Roger Harrabin noted that some streets were now being engineered the way he had wanted, with safety first.

In 2001 the Policy Studies Institute marked his 70th birthday with a festschrift, Ahead of Time: Birthday Letters to Mayer Hillman, in which 15 prominent thinkers wrote letters imagined from his 90th birthday in 2021, testing his predictions.

Hillman received the Camden Citizen's Award in 2000. In 2001 the Policy Studies Institute presented him with the festschrift Ahead of Time. In 2006 the Guardian named him number 37 in the Environment Agency's list of Earthshakers, the top green campaigners of all time. He was a patron of RoadPeace and of Sustrans, and served on the editorial boards of Town and Country Planning and Green Economics.

Selected books and reports include Walking Is Transport (1979, with Anne Whalley), One False Move: A Study of Children's Independent Mobility (1990, with John Adams and John Whitelegg), The Gaia Atlas of Green Economics (1992, with Paul Ekins and Robert Hutchison), Cycling: Towards Health and Safety (1992, for the British Medical Association), Cycle Helmets: The Case For and Against (1993), How We Can Save the Planet (2004, with Tina Fawcett) and The Suicidal Planet (2007, with Tina Fawcett and Sudhir Rajan).

He recorded a series of short video talks on his own YouTube channel on children's mobility, daylight hours, cycling, climate policy and transport planning, and spoke to Extinction Rebellion activists, Humanists UK and other audiences. His 2018 Guardian interview, headlined "We're doomed", was widely shared and discussed.

Mayer Hillman died on 25 September 2026, aged 94, a month short of his 95th birthday. Wikipedia gives London as the place of death. The cause of death was not made public. The chair of the Road Danger Reduction Forum, writing on X as his friend and colleague, announced the death the following day, sending condolences to his sons Josh and Saul. A funeral was held in early October 2026; the same friend posted on 9 October that he had just returned from a well attended service. Local Transport Today published a tribute on 30 September, and Anne Karpf's obituary appeared in the Guardian on 20 October 2026. He was survived by his sons and three grandchildren.