Andrew Gilligan is now transport advisor to British prime minister Boris Johnson.
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Journalist Andrew Gilligan has been appointed as the transport advisor to new British prime minister Boris Johnson. Gilligan was cycling commissioner when Johnson was Mayor of London, and it was Gilligan not Johnson that was most responsible for pushing through London’s protected cycleway program.
Gilligan is a senior correspondent for the Sunday Times, and will likely relinquish that job as he moves into his advisory role in 10 Downing Street. When he was the Mayor of London’s cycling commissioner Gilligan continued to work part time as a journalist.
When he was “cycling czar” from 2013 to 2016 London built its curb-protected “cycle superhighways,” which have since been renamed as “cycleways.”
When he was working for the BBC Gilligan produced a 2003 report for BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme which he described a British government briefing paper on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction as “sexed up.”
Gilligan has strong views on cycling and on the ills of mass motorization. Last year he told Cyclist magazine that the “vast majority of road space is given to the least efficient users of it.”
He holds a dim view of the government department he will now need to work with:
“The DfT [Department for Transport] I’ve always thought were a complete waste of time,” he told Cyclist.
And with Gilligan in a key role, it’s unlikely that the hot-button topic of compulsory helmets for cyclists is ever likely to be taken seriously:
“I don’t buy this argument that all cyclists should have insurance and wear helmets and high-vis and then everybody would love them,” said Gilligan. “That’s not true at all. People decide they don’t want cycling then they look for reasons to oppose it. Then sometimes they just make up reasons.”
Cyclists are not “complete paragons of virtue all the time,” said Gilligan but he added:
[Cyclists] don’t omit any pollution; they don’t create much congestion if any and they’re not a safety risk. Occasionally cyclists alarm people by riding on the pavement or something but the number of people killed by cyclists in London averages out to about 1 or 0.5 a year. The number of people killed by cars in London is about 100-200 a year I believe. It’s a silly argument.”
He is the most radically pro-cycling voice inside 10 Downing Street since the entrance of, well, Boris Johnson. (After getting his bicycle stolen in 2007, Johnson joked that “I’m calling for Sharia law for bicycle thieves.”)
Gilligan told Cyclist last year: “I don’t believe that the answer to London’s transport problems is a vast slew of new railways or transport links. I think the answer is cycling actually.”
In 2018 Gilligan wrote a report for the National Infrastructure Commission on the potential for cycling in Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes. “Running Out of Road” recommended the roll-out of many miles of protected cycleways to encourage cycling.
Appointing Gilligan as a transport advisor is a bold move by the new prime minister but, given the intertwined history of the two, not an unexpected one. However, it remains to be seen what any advisors or ministers can do to effect change given that Brexit will take up the whole bandwidth of government, possibly for many years. The proof would be in the pudding, and that pudding is the Spending Review, probably due out in Spring 2020, if this Brexit-or-bust administration lasts that long.
