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Chris Boardman (copyright Allan McKenzie, SWpix.com)Chris Boardman confirmed as permanent National Active Travel Commissioner
Chris Boardman has been confirmed as the permanent head of Active Travel England, the governmental body tasked with implementing the Gear Change strategy, after serving as its interim commissioner since January.
The former world and Olympic champion cyclist turned cycling and walking campaigner has been appointed with immediate effect and will be joined in August by Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Danny Williams and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Louise Wilkinson.
Williams has 25 years of experience leading media businesses, but has become known in cycling circles for his Cyclists in the City blog and his longstanding campaign to make streets safer for people on bikes, which has involved sitting on Transport for London’s Roads Task Force when Boris Johnson was Mayor of the city.
Wilkinson has previously worked in strategic finance and accounting within the civil service and local government, including a recent spell as Deputy Director of Finance in the Cabinet Office.
> Chris Boardman heads newly-launched government body Active Travel England
Graham Grant, currently Assistant Director of Transport at Newcastle City Council, will also be making the move to Active Travel England as its Director of Planning and Development in the autumn. He joins Brian Deegan, one of the UK’s leading street design engineers and co-author of the London Cycling Design Standards, who was announced as Director of Inspections in May 2022.
“Today’s appointments are another great step for Active Travel England as it continues to make sure getting around our towns and cities on foot or by bike is an easy and attractive option,” says Cycling Minister Trudy Harrison.
“Chris, Danny, Louise and the rest of the incoming team are hugely respected experts in their field and are dedicated to making people-friendly streets a reality. I wish them every success and will do all I can to support them.”
Boardman said: “I am thrilled to be announced as permanent National Active Travel Commissioner and to be given this incredible opportunity. To help change the travel culture of a nation is by far the most important thing I have ever, or will ever, be involved in.
“For cycling and walking to become the natural choice for shorter journeys, people must feel safe and the options must be easy.
“Active Travel England aims to help local authorities across the country deliver that environment, so that people can get to schools, shops and workplaces under their own steam. That’s the kind of place people want to live and the freedoms they want for their children.”
Launching the new government agency in January, the Department for Transport said that Active Travel England, which will be based in York, “will be responsible for driving up the standards of cycling and walking infrastructure and managing the national active travel budget, awarding funding for projects that improve both health and air quality.”
The new entity “will also begin to inspect, and publish reports on, highway authorities for their performance on active travel and identify particularly dangerous failings in their highways for cyclists and pedestrians.
“As well as approving and inspecting schemes,” it will also “help local authorities, training staff and spreading good practice in design, implementation and public engagement. It will be a statutory consultee on major planning applications to ensure that the largest new developments properly cater for pedestrians and cyclists.”
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
Latest Comments
- brooksby 2 sec ago
You mean that they are Otherwise Law-Abiding™ ?
- brooksby 7 min 53 sec ago
What fresh devilry is this??? - perhaps they had a design for some handlebars, and another design for some forks, and somewhere along the line the...
- brooksby 11 min 32 sec ago
And finally: I wonder how many of the "more than 3,000" signatures on that petition are actually locals, who live or work there (and are not just...
- Doug_D 1 hour 47 min ago
Another book suggestion - I can highly recommend "Lost Summers and Half-Forgotten Afternoons: A Mint Sauce collection" - a beautifully presented...
- chrisonabike 3 hours 5 sec ago
But... the last is only not the case with drivers on normal roads because driving on the cycle path / footway / rolling a vehicle up there is seen...
- mdavidford 3 hours 38 min ago
I think you're missing an opportunity to pack even more tech into it - add accelerometers that can detect whether they're pedalling or stepping....
- chrisonabike 4 hours 2 min ago
Thanks. I guess the question is "need". If the road is busy, it sounds like it is a desired route between places? In which case (given this an...
- mdavidford 4 hours 10 min ago
Don't know what you mean. I thought my suggestion was entirely practical.
- Rapha Nadal 4 hours 45 min ago
I'd buy a motorbike fo rthat kind of money!
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19 comments
While St Chris of Boardman's appointment is good news, and the rest of the team look equally as good, the question remains; where's the money? A good start would be 10% of the national roads budget, ramping up over ten years to 50% of it.
Yup - moolah or it doesn't happen. For "a good start" of 10% why not move north? I'd still leave it a decade or two to see the effects though. Where I stay is blessed but most of the good stuff is well over 10 years old.
I saw the headline and instantly thought the same - there is absolutely NO POINT creating a quango that has no teeth and a derisory budget.
Having said that, if active travel is finally taken seriously then these are the kinds of people you want in the driving seat.
In the saddle, surely?
It's the right people in the right place. What we need to do now is get the Tories out of power and replace them with people who have some kind of morality or ethics - then maybe all the money spent on car-centric living will be reallocated.
That'll be the Greens then, the only party left with any principles.
Don't kid yourself Burt.
https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/19703141.amp
But surely the trains were cancelled due to the planned strikes, so that's not exactly "unreliable" on days when there's not strikes.
I think there should be a general principle of leaders "eating their own dog food", so they should get to experience public transport and how well it is working. If they get a train to a conference and get delayed, then that is probably making a more important point than just making empty speeches about how green they are.
In a similar principle (and maybe back on topic), we need people involved with active travel to attempt to walk/cycle as much as possible which is why these three are good choices.
Trains are unreliable full stop in my experience, and major barrier to many in getting away from car use at least some of the time, such as commutes.
I have been figuring out ways to cycle more of my commute as I am already cycling some of the way, many though will just give up and either use a car, or as I have known change jobs to one where they can get to work by car. When an annual ticket is in excess of £4k driving is often cheaper, and pricing people out of cars isn't an answer unless you address that £4k+ at the same time.
That's why politicians need to experience the trains and that should give them a prod to try to improve matters. Personally, I think we've got the priorities wrong and train companies are optimised for profit, not for moving people around cheaply, easily and efficiently.
There's an immense cost to society by having personal cars being the cheapest way to get around, so we need to get some of those external costs (congestion, poor air, healthcare etc) priced into the cost of running a car. Air travel is far more of a problem however - the fuel isn't even taxed and don't get me started on empty planes needing to fly so that companies can keep their airport slots allocated.
Absolutely. 20 years of commuting to London in the south east I have seen companies come and go, walking away with profits while fleecing the customer. Currently under govt control due to southeastern trains being investigated for £25m fraud.
All well a good, but as I say you have to address the cost of alternatives and/or acknowledge that it isn't a one size fits all. There is little alternative in many places.
The reason there's little alternative is mainly due to the car/oil companies that have pushed their view of transport for a hundred years. It's hardly surprising there's little alternatives if you deliberately don't build them. (I'm still waiting for the Portishead train line to be reinstated)
I was similarly sceptical about his 'justification'.
If a prominent member of the Green Party travelling to a conference on climate change to deliver a speech about reducing our carbon footprint can't be bothered to travel in a responsible manner then I don't hold out much hope for avoiding a climate disaster tbh.
Not wanting to put a dampener on things, but the world's economy is based around exploiting resources (including human labour) as quickly as possible, so I doubt that we can fix things without removing capitalism or at least putting in a lot of controls. Unforunately, the most powerful people have a vested interest in keeping the status quo, so the only real answer is either mass revolutions or societal collapse (or both).
With the right regulations capitalism can help us get out of our current mess.
Consider how quickly wind and solar power have developed. That's driven by capitalism.
Put an accurate tax on all carbon emissions and then watch capitalism work its magic.
Capitalism got us into the mess so it can get us out!
I think it will - like how cars (or initially omnibuses and trucks and streetcars) got us out of the last transport crisis. Hopefully the next one will be after me.
I think if we accurately taxed transport exernalities we would be immediately in a real crisis!
Maybe the regulations are as much a problem as the capitalism? None but satirists seem bold enough to propose a completely free market though And there seems to be some slight disagreement on how to harness it to safely put it to work...
One of the issues with capitalism is that the rich people are able to have a disproportionate influence over politicians and a lot of rich people are still making a lot of money from fossil fuels, so it seems unlikely that accurate taxes will be applied (e.g. fuel duty).
9 November 21
Best of luck Chris!