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Car
Dodge Ram
A Dodge Ram is a large pickup truck. It’s designed to carry heavy loads and tow things, but because it’s big and heavy, it can cause more damage if it’s used in a crash or an intentional collision.
Concept
deliberative learning
It means learning from accidents in a careful, constructive way. Instead of just blaming someone, you look at what caused the crash and change things so it doesn’t happen again.
Concept
road safety
Road safety is how we reduce crashes and keep people from getting hurt on public roads. It includes things like better design, better rules, and learning from past crashes.
Concept
restorative justice
Restorative justice is about addressing the harm caused by an incident and helping people move forward. Instead of only punishing, it brings the right people together to acknowledge what happened and prevent it from happening again.
Topic
restoring public recognition of road deaths
They’re arguing that society has gotten used to road deaths. The host suggests making it more public and visible—like memorials—so people treat it as a serious harm, not something that just happens.
Term
ghost bike
A ghost bike is a memorial left near a road where someone was killed. People place a white bicycle there to remember them and draw attention to the danger.
Concept
airline industry
They’re using airlines as an example of how safety can be improved. The idea is that when something goes wrong, the focus is on learning and preventing it from happening again.
Concept
mobile phone distraction
This means looking at or using a phone while driving. It takes your eyes and attention off the road, which makes crashes more likely.
Concept
environmental one what it was in this system in this layout that produced this death
They’re saying a crash usually isn’t caused by one thing alone. Instead, they want to look at the whole setup—like the road layout and how the car and driving conditions interact—to understand why it happened and how to prevent it next time.
Term
Apple CarPlay
Apple CarPlay lets you connect your iPhone to your car so you can see and use some phone features on the car’s screen. The point here is that it can show things like text-message alerts while you’re driving, which can tempt people to look away from the road.
Term
unsafe at any speed
“Unsafe at any speed” is a famous safety book by Ralph Nader. In this discussion, it’s used as an example of how safety problems in cars led to changes in design through regulation.
Term
steering columns
The steering column is the part that connects your steering wheel to the steering system. In serious crashes, safety design aims to have it collapse so it’s less likely to drive into the driver.
Concept
regulate driver cars not how you punish individuals human drivers
This is arguing that road safety should focus on fixing the whole system—like car design and rules—rather than mainly punishing the driver after the fact. The goal is to make it harder for mistakes to turn into deadly outcomes.
Concept
transformative justice
Transformative justice is an approach to justice that tries to prevent harm from happening again. Instead of only punishing someone, it focuses on changing what led to the harm in the first place.
Concept
disassembling the dangerous actant
This is a way of thinking about a dangerous crash as involving both the driver and the car/technology involved. The point is that fixing the problem may require safety actions that reduce the chance of the same kind of harm happening again.
Term
license suspension and revocation
This means the government can take away your right to drive. Suspension is a temporary stop; revocation is a longer or permanent removal. The idea here is to use that to prevent dangerous driving from happening again.
Term
motor normativity
This means society treats driving as the normal, expected thing people do. The argument is that judges may avoid taking licenses away because it’s viewed as cutting someone off from normal life.
Term
black boxes
In cars, “black boxes” are devices that record what happened during a crash or other event. They can store data that helps investigators understand the situation.
Term
breath test
A breath test checks whether a driver has been drinking by measuring alcohol in their breath. The idea mentioned here is that the car could refuse to start unless the driver passes that check.
Term
speed governor
A speed governor is a device that caps how fast a vehicle can go. It’s like a built-in speed limit that prevents the car from exceeding a set maximum.
Term
intelligence-based speed assistance
This is a modern safety feature that helps control your speed using information about the road. The goal is to keep the car closer to the posted speed limit automatically or with guidance.
Concept
moto normativity
This phrase is about how people think about what “normal” driving should look like. The host is saying that those expectations affect whether people accept safety rules like cameras versus rules that take away things drivers rely on.
Term
speed cameras
Speed cameras are cameras that automatically catch cars going faster than allowed. They’re used to ticket drivers for speeding.
Term
red light cameras
Red light cameras watch intersections and ticket drivers who run a red light. They’re meant to discourage dangerous crossing when the light is red.
LIVE
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I mean there's a case I described in the study where a motorist had killed a
cyclist somewhere in England while being distracted on their phone for
wiping away notifications and they were convicted but I was struck by the judge
describing the cases very sad. In all kinds of ways it was very sad but it
struck me that that's not the kind of judicial utterance that you ever get in
equivalent forms of violence which involve guns or or knives or people who
kind of fit rather more neatly into our stereotypes of what criminals are
supposed to look and feel like.
This is the War on Cars. I'm Doug Gordon. My co-host Sarah Goodyear is off this week.
If you listen to this podcast you probably have very strong feelings about
what the law should or shouldn't do when a driver kills or injures someone
else on the road. You probably have seen headlines like car injures pedestrian
and gotten upset by the passive voice or the lack of any mention of a driver. Such
phrasing it seems makes it harder to hold individuals to account when they
harm another person but by focusing on individual responsibility and the
punishment of drivers who are reckless or make a mistake behind the wheel is the
law perpetuating a system of harm that obscures the larger problems with our
car-centric society. Is the way we're doing things just another form of
moto normativity a concept we've talked about on the show before and we are
going to redefine later and do we need to rethink the way we respond to drivers
who kill and injure other road users. We will get to all of that in a moment but
first we are on patreon at patreon.com slash the war on cars pod if you like
what we do please sign up we depend on listener support and you can join us for
just three dollars per month. Okay I want to get right to this because we have an
incredible guest for this one who is the author of a really fascinating study. My
guest is Ian Loder a professor at the University of Oxford in the UK where he
teaches and researches criminology. He is an honorary professorial fellow in the
School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne and a
fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society for the Arts. He's also the
chair of Cyclox which campaigns for safe and inclusive cycling in Oxford. As I
mentioned he is the author of a fascinating study it's called Beyond
Motornormative Punishment on Road Safety as Environmental Regulation which was
published this year in the British Journal of Criminology. Professor Ian Loder
welcome to the war on cars. Pleasure to be here. Let's start right with
motornormativity. So we are having you on at the suggestion of Professor Ian
Walker who we had on on episode 99 to talk about the concept that he coined
motornormativity. I wonder if you could help us redefine motornormativity and how
that factors into your research as a criminologist. As Ian Walker defines it
motornormativity is the kind of unconscious belief that getting around by
car or motorised transport is either how we do or how we should get around. So it's
either just a kind of stubborn fact about our world that can't really be
changed and we just need to kind of suck it up if you like except it or it's made
as a kind of normative claim really that driving is associated with freedom and
status and all sorts of values that we like and we should design our cities
accordingly. And the point that Ian Walker makes and he does lots of fancy studies that
have also been replicated by Tara Goddard is that that unconscious bias has all
sorts of effects. One of which is it leads people to be much more tolerant of risk
and danger in a driving context than they would have equivalent risks in other
settings or other spheres of their life. So one of the questions he asks people is
about what they think about smoking at the school gate as opposed to a tailpipe
exhaust at the small gate and they tend to be much more tolerant of the second rather than the first.
In the context of criminology you write in the introduction to your study that you are offering
a critique of what you call motornormative punishment which you define as a mix of legal
sanctions and a culture of blame that focuses on the behaviour of a minority of careless
or dangerous drivers while accommodating the structural violence generated by regimes of
automobility. A phrase that I really enjoy here. Can you expand on that idea? What is motornormative
punishment? I think for me motornormative punishment is two things. One is there has
long been a suspicion in people who work on kind of motoring law that juries and judges and sentences
approach forms of kind of injury and harm and violence committed by people in a car
rather more lightly and leniently than they would equivalent forms of harm and violence
committed by other kinds of people or other kinds of objects knives and guns for example.
And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is the justice system
is kind of set up on the assumption and I think this is how many people think about it
that it's it's it's meant to be protecting the majority of law-abiding citizens from a small
minority who are kind of intent on doing bad things to us and need to be kind of investigated
and punished and motoring is not like that because motoring is a kind of form of mass harm
that most of us have engaged in or can engage in on a more or less serious basis at various
points in our life. So the suspicion of the motornormative assumption is that confronted
with a driver who has driven carelessly or been distracted by looking at their mobile phone or
by changing the music on their music system and caused injury and death that there's just a little
bit of the juror or the sentence or the judge who thinks that could be me or that could be a member
of my family or that could be someone I know someone I love and find it hard to see the criminality
and therefore in all kinds of ways treat the matter even though the harm can be in some
like many cases you know involve fatalities treat the harm in some sense not as seriously
as they would equivalent forms of violence committed by other means. So that's the first thing
the second thing is I think the kind of work that law does in this realm is to kind of focus
attention on the responsibility of the individual driver the cultural and motornormative starting
point it makes is that driving is essentially safe it's a system of mobility which is for the most
part pretty harmless and it only becomes dangerous at the margins when people drive excessively
fast or drunk or inebriated or driving recklessly or carelessly and so on and so forth and the job
of the law is to identify those people and punish them and I think what that starting assumption does
is effectively reproduce what I think is a social illusion and the social illusion is that driving
is safe rather than being a regime of mobility which in all kinds of ways is harm producing.
And in fact you cite a number of people that we cite in our book and that we've had on the show
such as Paul Donald the author of Trafication who argues that often when we're talking about
the law and driving we're not talking about the harm to nature for example we're not talking
about the harm to animals we're not talking about the harm to the environment in general
our lungs and things like that so you're arguing essentially that the entire system of driving
a car-centric system is on its face harmful and we have to start there. I think we need to start
there and there's two things to say about I mean what I do in the paper is to kind of say
it matters a lot how we define the term road safety and what we call the various forms of
injury that fall under that heading whether we call them accidents or the harm or violence and so on
and so forth and some of that has to do with the things that road safety generally conjures up in
people's minds it's human beings being injured and killed in bike collisions on the road and
the figures in that are I think fairly alarming this is a there's a whole history in geography to
this story as you and your listeners will know well. In fact you cite Peter Norton and other
people to talk about sort of the how we got here how we came to see the harm caused by automobiles
and an automobile-centric system as just background noise and that only on the margins on the most
extreme examples as you mentioned do we really talk about the harm of this system. That's true
and I think a long time ago at some level our societies kind of came to assume that injury
and death on the road even though we might worry about it and want the margins to do
things to control it was a price worth paying for the freedom and convenience of getting around
routinely by car and the consequence of that as we know is 1.2 million people on this planet get
killed in a road collision every year in America as you'll know well rates of injury and death on
the road have been going up in the last 10 years and now stand at a 40 year high so that's one
significant part of the problem but I only think it's one part of the problem generated by
automobility systems or regimes another you just mentioned which we haven't tended though
interestingly this was a worry about the arrival of the car back in the 1920s we haven't attended
very closely to forms of injury and death to non-human animals committed by road collisions
and to the effect of kind of of the prevalence of traffic of the building of road networks on
species and biodiversity loss and there's a small body of people who count all this stuff and good
on them but for the most part that doesn't feature in the kind of common discussion about this
but then we need to factor in consequences that automobility has for the quality of our air and
our soundscape both in terms of you know something that has become quite well known which is the
contribution of transportation to carbon emissions but also to the quality of the air that we breathe
and most of that isn't tailpipe emissions part of that is abrasion from brake pads and tires
and it has a significant health impact on people who inhale such particles into their lungs
and I think the final thing just to briefly mention there is I mean at various points on the show
you've had discussions about the ways in which we have redesigned our cities to make them
kind of safe for the car if you want to put it like that with the consequences that the
possibilities for things like children's play space for the possibilities of social interactions that
come from communal life all that has been sacrificed to make it easier and freer to get around by car
so my starting point in doing this work and the thing I'm trying to understand and describe
and respond to is that we've created a system of mobility which is systemically harmful
in all kinds of ways including to people who drive and the thing to understand about that
is is the ways in which that's becoming all kinds of quarters an extremely controversial
and jarring thing to say that if you if you talk to people most of the time that they are quite
challenged by the idea that the the object they use to get around on a daily basis
may be the cause of of kind of systemic harm one reason for that is that the harm is aggregate
often it's it's a contribution of everyone making a kind of small journey on a daily basis
and just because and this takes us back to the kind of motor normativity thing
it's just been folded into our sense of what normal life is supposed to look and feel like
well and if you do question that system then what you know I can question that system because I
live in New York City and I have dozens of options for living my life without a car I can walk I can
cycle I can rent a car when I need one I can take the bus I can take the subway I can have things
delivered easily to my home but I think for most Americans and most people in any car dominant
society this is a thing we've spoken about many times on this show is that if you were to question
it what could you do as an individual with that information which sort of gets to one of the
points of your study which is that we sort of do need to take this away from the realm of individual
choices and actions and and think more in terms of societal harms which I want to get to so let's
drill down on some of the terms we use to describe accidents crashes road violence traffic violence
there has been a huge and successful movement to stop using the phrase accidents you cite
jessie singer and her book there are no accidents which is a great book and we've had her on the
show and to move towards crashes the ap here in the us and around the world when they talk about
these things they say crash not accident advocates often talk about road violence or traffic violence
because when someone is killed it is a violent rendering of that person from the world from
their life from their family from everyone that they care about let's talk about some of those
phrases you have your own issues with traffic violence or road violence as phrases but admit
that they sort of will do at least for now that's where I land I mean you're right in saying there's
there's been two related kind of issues raised by campaigners and activists around this one you
just described which is I think we are moving away from the idea that these are accidents
certainly in this country in the UK police forces and journalists have now become much
better at least using a more neutral sounding term like collision there remains another very
common practice which is also challenged by activists which is to report road collisions
as if there were no human being involved so you will typically find reports saying a woman hit
by car at street junction as if somehow the car was the only relevant actor at the scene people
get very upset about that and I can understand why because I think it's a way of denying any human
involvement in a violent event and it's also a way of kind of sneaking the whole problem back
slightly into the realm of accident as if these kind of things just happen they're kind of acts
of god they're just there's not really much that we can do about them and I think road safety
campaigners have on the one hand been very successful in making a I think a move which is
strategically necessary which is to reinsert a human driver into these situations my worry
is that by doing that that they've played into that kind of motor normative language I've just
been describing in other words they reinsert the idea that when we think about road safety and
road violence that we need to focus our attention on the responsibility of individual drivers and I
think that's that's a big big mistake and it's a mistake our law makes and it's a mistake that
sometimes road safety activists can find themselves kind of falling back into I have a similar
conversation with myself about this on the one hand yes I do understand why people say hey wait a
minute you said you know car hit cyclist but a driver was behind the wheel and what was that
driver doing were they texting were they drunk were they distracted in some other way but then of
course that is coming up against the movement among activists to decarsify let's say the
consequences to really think more systemically about road violence as a systemic problem but
those two things are at odds if we say oh this driver was distracted well then we just need fewer
distracted drivers and you leave open this conversation that if everyone would quote unquote
just behave and if we could punish people and they could get the right message that if they don't
just behave they will be punished then we'll all be fine but of course I think we all know and most
people listening to this understand that it is a systemic problem you know I think about it in
terms of like consumer products when kids were killed by lawn darts in the 1970s and 80s we didn't
say child killed by person throwing lawn dart we said child killed by lawn dart and the US consumer
products commission or whatever ban lawn darts so I go back and forth on this but what I loved
about your study is it kind of takes even what I'm talking about to a higher level of conversation
that challenged my own way of thinking which I'm wrestling with still so I wonder if we could
really expand on that just a little bit more before we get into the nitty gritty of the study.
Let me scroll back for a couple of things there's one important thing to say about the work that
punishment does here there's a famous French sociologist in the 19th century called Emile Durkheim
who famously argued that the principal target of punishment is not the person being punished
it's the onlookers it's the people who are watching the punishment being enacted and what
punishment does he argues is to kind of shore up the kind of moral conscience of the people watching
and provide a kind of reassurance that they are the good people and the bad person is being punished
and I think something similar happens in kind of the motoring space when law intervenes to
identify and blame the individual driver which is the rest of us feel on one hand reassured
that the individual driver responsible for this act of violence or injury or death
has been appropriately dealt with by the courts and the rest of us can be reassured that one
that we are not like that we are safe drivers and that the whole system that might in all kinds
of ways have contributed to that particular incident is itself safe and that's why I think
that the important sense the kind of cultural role that law plays here and punishment plays here
is to reproduce the illusion that driving is a safe system and that the problem is the individual
bad driver I think that's a huge mistake and I worry that that's the mistake that the kind of
road safety lobby fall back into when they in some ways quite properly try and insist on reinserting
the driver into the story and the reporting. The word that you settle on really is harm
this idea that we need to think of this entire system as harmful one that begins the minute we
roll out of the driveway and onto the road park the cart work or wherever we're going and make the
return trip and not on these extreme cases of traffic violence or injury and death and as you
write harm has a capaciousness that is helpful acknowledging and drawing our attention to detrimental
impacts that may not be intended or even regulated by criminal law so we are going to get into the
idea of criminal consequences because I don't want people to think that in your study and you'll
we'll get to this for sure that you're arguing there should never be criminal consequences for a
driver who injures or kills someone else with their car that you can drive drunk you can fiddle
with the radio look at your phone and it's really a systemic problem and individuals have no
bearing on this system that's not what you're arguing but what you do want us to do is just
de-center criminalization as our primary means of fixing this system and also not in the way that I
think we sometimes talk about here in the United States for example where we say sending someone
to prison a carceral solution to these things is not necessarily going to fix the problem
you know restorative justice and other forms of consequences might be better that's not even
what you're arguing you're saying we have to completely upend the notion of where the law
enters into the conversation is that correct in the way that I'm thinking about this that's
entirely correct all right that's good I'm glad you said I was entirely correct thank you it's
not that I want criminal law and punishment to kind of entirely get out of the way we treat this
as just some kind of regulation of harm problem I still think there are a whole series of driving
offenses that should be driving offenses as in against the law and there may be moments where
that has consequences which take the form of punishment but I think that should come a long
long long way down the forms of thinking and action that we need to take in order to deal with the
harm producing consequences of automobility systems so they need to kind of excuse the
motoring pun they need to get in the backseat well you write that in the study that criminal
law and punishment must take a backseat and that we need to de-center the penal mindset and treat
the problem instead as a matter of environmental regulation which I thought was a great way of
thinking about this because this is the environment in which we are living in and the harms are to
our very environment itself both societal and the actual biosphere that we're living in I think
harm is helpful here because it takes the conversation beyond the question of whether or not
that various injuries produced by systems of automobility should or should not be criminal
offenses there are various forms of systemic harm generated which we need to think morally
and politically seriously about without saying we just need more crimes here and equally I think
at the other end you can properly use the word violence to describe what's going on it's a fact
in a bit of the world that I work in criminal law and punishment violence always sends a signal that
some individual is somehow deliberately set out to inflict an injury upon someone else and that's
why the term can sometimes jar but I when you just said the serious destruction of of animal and human
life and the environments there's all kinds of ways in which it makes proper sense to describe
that as violence both because at one level it is a provocation because it jars with so many people
but at one level it's also an accurate description of what's going on to that point
which you make in the study in which we talk about all the time nobody wakes up in the morning
and before they get in the car to commute to work says you know what I might try to do today
I might try to kill someone with my car now there are deliberate acts of road violence as we've seen
people intentionally ram their cars in political protests or against cyclists or things like that
but I think we all generally understand that most of the harm that is caused by drivers or cars or
our road system is unintentional and that also then becomes part of the motto normative aspect
of our penal system where as you mentioned earlier a judge or a jury or a defense attorney says well
this person didn't mean to do this they're not a bad person and so therefore hey it could be any
of us who fiddled with the radio and you know let's go lightly on this person I mean there's
a case I described in the study where a motorist had killed a cyclist it's somewhere in England
while being distracted on their phone for wiping away notifications and they were convicted
but I was struck by the judge describing the case as very sad you know in all kinds of ways
it was very sad but it struck me that that's not the kind of judicial utterance that you ever get
in equivalent forms of violence which involve guns or or knives or people who kind of fit rather
more neatly into our stereotypes of what criminals are supposed to look and feel like
so let's get into how you say we should radically de-center criminal punishment
from how we respond to road harm you say as I mentioned that we should turn to practices
of environmental regulation organized around five road violence reduction principles
or as you call them the five D's those are diversion design distributed agency deliberative
learning and the disassembly of dangerous actants which that one is really one of my favorites
we're going to get to that let's walk through them one by one I think diversion is probably
pretty simple for people to understand define what diversion is diversion to criminal justice term
so there's been a lot of talk in criminal justice circles for years about when you acknowledge
the kind of harmfulness and futility of sending people to prison thinking of all kinds of ways
in which you can divert people from the criminal justice system or from prison into more productive
responses to their harm I borrow the word but I don't quite mean that what I'm trying to get at
is that driving is harmful not because individuals are taking a whole series of bad decisions
but the harm generated by automobility is a systemic problem and it's a population level
problem and that the point one in trying to tackle it is effectively trying to reduce the
amount of driving that goes on in the society the amount of tonnage of cars on the road the
amount of miles driven and to generate a series of kind of policy options that can make that
realistic and one starting point here is just to name that as a public policy goal
and there's very few places in the world where even that's stated unfortunate enough to live in
one of them my my local authority here in Oxford has a stated policy objection to reduce the number
of miles driven and has a diet of policies to try and generate that if you want to reduce
road harm that needs to be the starting point and it requires all kinds of things that you and
others have discussed in this show many times generating no decent affordable alternatives in
terms of public transportation a safe bike infrastructure in other words to kind of just
radically multiply the options that people have to get themselves and their loved ones and their
things around on a daily basis so they don't have to drive all the time I mean how we do that takes
me a long way away from this paper but that that has to be the starting point and as you write
you say in the short term these measures are geared towards diversion and the measures you're
talking about are you know moving people to public transport giving people more options
and you continue you say they're ultimately aimed at dismantling automobility as a system
and form of life in favor of living with multimodal mobility systems in which car travel becomes a
specific use transport mode of the last resort which is music to the war on cars here so I think
that was really fascinating it's like you want to be able to have a menu of options and a car
may be the right tool for the job but shouldn't be the only tool for the job you mentioned the
philosopher Emile Durkheim and Ian Walker mentioned David Hume so I don't know what it is about
British researchers who are into this subject and philosophers but I do love it it's pretty great
so the next one of the five D's is design and that should be pretty simple for people to understand
if they're regular listeners of this show but I want you to expand on the idea of system design or
road design as a solution here I mean design is pretty self-heaven but it can mean a number of
things I mean one is you could start with the object itself I mean all kinds of ways modern cars
are getting safer there advanced braking systems and so on so forth so one does want to focus some
attention on that in this context we as a society need to have a serious conversation about the
increasing size of cars and the ways in which the motor industry has been enabled to increase the
weight and size of cars in full knowledge both that those cars take up more of limited city space
and that they are objectively more dangerous if involved in a collision so naming and handling
and regulating the problem of car spreading I would fold under an element of design but for the most
part design is about how we think about streets and what they're for and who we allow access to them
at what speed so I have in mind here the whole diet of policy measures that have been taken
around the world to do with controlling speed in built-up areas of generating areas of cities
where cars can't go where we prioritize other kinds of use the general point being that we've
spent a hundred years designing cities putting the car first and designing cities around them
and I think we it's about time we reverse the order of those things and design the kind of
cities that we want to live in and then figure out the ways in which the car can safely exist in
that environment and for my money and I'm not the first person to say that it means treating a car
as a guest not an owner and that has all kinds of consequences for how we think about the physical
organization of the landscape and that makes much more sense in safety terms than dealing with
enforcement I mean the Dutch I think I'm right in saying they've got a kind of saying that if people
keep speeding on a particular road you don't get out a speed camera you go you redesign the road so
they can't speed and that's kind of the kind of thing I have in mind though to go back to your
point I mean I I don't think the police and enforcement are central to how we make roads safer
but they have a part to play conceptually I would think about policing and law enforcement and
camera surveillance and all the other techniques we use to try and slow down and control road
traffic as part of the design piece rather than a separate enforcement piece and interesting that
you say that because one of the things that stuck out to me in this study was that you're framing
driving and our system of driving as a harmful system in and of itself right so of course law
enforcement should be there to stop drunk drivers or perhaps to see a person fiddling with their phone
and pull them over but you write that in a system such as driving law breaking is the majority
you know everybody is breaking the law we've all sped a little bit or not come to a complete stop at
a stop sign or whatever it is and therefore it's futile to treat road safety as principally a law
enforcement issue because the cops can't pull over everyone and that beyond design of slowing
down drivers we also need to radically rethink where and how cars are allowed to operate so you
cite things like the super blocks in Barcelona low traffic neighborhoods in london and low emission
zones for example and just slowing the speed in general so it's kind of a radical rethinking of
just where and how cars should operate within our lives within our cities within our society
that's right that's right okay the next of the five d's is distributed agency we've been talking
a lot about how we should think about individual driver responsibility and the passive voice often
in the reporting of road violence you know you cite a story from the u.s where police are
investigating after a woman was hit by two cars and killed and that we need to rethink
how we talk about this stuff but you're right to reduce road harm we do not need individualized
responsibility and you say this is part of the road unsafety problem we need to think about
diffused responsibility so what is that diffused responsibility is two things consistent with the
idea that you think of about automobilities a harmful system or regime that you have to ask
questions about the ways in which different actors in that regime can be responsible for
road unsafety and and harm so the diffusing of responsibility means that when we think about
these questions we call car manufacturers to account for kinds of products they promote and how
they advertise them we think about city planners and traffic engineers and the kinds of environments
that they build in other words there's a whole network of actors and institutions who are responsible
for the management the creation and management of the system in which road safety or unsafety
takes place and their moments in which i'm like cool come on to this you want to call them into
the room to be part of the conversation so that's one part the second part it comes back to what
we were discussing earlier that there's this kind of two and fro between the kind of those who want
to kind of write out the the agency of the human and talk about cars running people over as if they
no else was at the scene and the kind of move of the road safety lobby which wants to kind of
re-insist on the responsibility of the driver and i think both of those moves are a mistake
so this is clearly french sociologist's day um i was about to bring him up because this i i want
to i actually do want to like tell people to like perk up their ears because this to me was the
most fascinating part of the study not that the whole thing wasn't fascinating but let's talk
about bruno latour so bruno latour very helpfully and analogously has this really interesting analysis
of how we think about gun violence and his starting question is do guns kill people or do people kill
people the problem is individuals who would kill people anyway with a gun or no gun or whether
or not the gun has been the thing that makes them kill and you can have an analogous discussion
about whether cars kill people about whether drivers kill people latour says that's a mistake
and it's a mistake that follows from the fact that when we think about the world we think about
humans who have agency and objects that in this view of the world have no agency and he thinks
that's a mistake because he says that actually what we need to think about is the relationship
between humans and their objects and what happens when they are brought into a relation so he wants
to say that the human with a gun is a different kind of human or a human driving a car than a human
without a gun or a car and the gun locked in the locker is a different object than when it comes
into correspondence with a human and the car is a different kind of object parked in a garage than
when it's being driven so that the creation of this human object relation creates a new thing
in the world he thinks the thing that we're trying to have to reckon with in this this context and
this is the point I try to make is not the driver who's responsible or the car who apparently can
act on its own but a distinct and distinctively risky agent he uses the fancy term actant because
he says humans have kind of monopolized the word agent so you call them an actant so yeah he calls
them a hybrid actant which I found fascinating I mean at one level it sounds weird but I think
we all know that experience anyone who has driven knows they are not quite the same person
behind the wheel of a car as they are outside of it I spend much of my kind of campaigning life
trying to get 20 mile an hour limits in my city but behind the wheel of the car I'm perfectly
capable of thinking god this is slow because you you are suddenly not the same person as a driver
then you are outside of it and the car is not the same thing with you driving it then if it's
parked on your driveway and and I think we do know this intuitively that we are something different
neither man nor machine separate but something in between we often talk about cars as like an
exoskeleton for humans you know what's the worst thing that a cyclist or pedestrian can do to a
driver if they're about to be hit by that car hit the windshield tap on the on the window you know
what do drivers say don't you touch my car no harm has come to the driver you haven't scratched the car
but it feels like an invasion of personal space so the car is not just this piece of property like
oh you scuffed my shoes it's something more than that so I think we do understand this intuitively
and that's why the phrase hybrid actant really stuck with me because I felt like ah that that
really explains it in a way that makes sense to me and I think it's it's kind of easy to laugh
this off as a piece of fancy french philosophy but I don't think it is I think it has real
practical implications because all of a sudden you're not trying to punish a driver or put
controls on a car you're trying to regulate a particular kind of entity in the world that
is different from the human and different from the object another thing that you write along
these lines in the study is that when a new technology and let's consider a car a new
technology in terms of humanity comes along it creates something new that didn't exist before
and you write for example we move from I can drive to the shops rather than walk or take
public transit a new category of activity of human behavior is created through the action of this so
it stands to reason then that a new form of killing that needs to be re-examined in terms of how we
react to it how we prevent it also is invented or should be invented as a result and I think if
you think about it in the terms you've just described it's very odd to suddenly think well
our response to the creation of that new risk is to kind of extract the individual human from the
situation and focus all our attention on them rather than the whole mix of human technology
relation built environments various forms of regulation and technological innovation all
of which have been responsible for generating that harmful environment I want to read this part
because I read it multiple times and highlighted it you write a system of environmental road
harm regulation needs to diffuse responsibility along these lines it must recognize that the
object of regulation is not human motorists the human vehicle coupling constitutes a novel distinct
and distinctively risky agent in the world it requires a post-human ontology that treats road
violence not as the fault of drivers or product of human error but as the situated outcome of
relations between specific human object hybrids driver cars as you say and I love your you're
rather self-effacing in your study and you say this may appear highfalutin but it's an important
concept to really dig into and I said it deliberately I mean I was just saying I mean it can all look
like what one's disappeared off into the world of kind of philosophical reflection but I don't
think that for a minute I think if you took that idea seriously it would have really radical
practical consequences I have a special guest back with me in the studio this is your third
or fourth appearance on the podcast yeah what's your name is Zeb Gordon oh I should know that
because you're my son how old are you now I'm 13 it's kind of wild that you've been doing this
since 2018 since you were really little yeah okay so we're here to talk about clever hood
we both took our clever hood rover rain capes do you remember where
Disney Disney world because we were traveling together because I've been on book tour and
what does the guilty father do they take you to Disney Disney world when they've been away
what I remember about that trip was it really only rained like once while we were there I had my
like perk bag because I'm a Disney adult you're shaking your head why are you shaking your head
because you're scared you have the gear the Mickey bag I have the gear I did take our clever hoods
because the cool thing about them was that they stuffed down so small into that bag that we could
walk around all day and you probably didn't even know I had them until I pulled it out yeah what
do you like about the clever hood they're good for biking like when we did the fiber of right
when it was raining a lot we did the fiber of bike tour and it started raining towards the tail
and it really started and what do we do and we just put them on and they were really good
stuff for the thumbs right they have thumb loops so that when you're holding your handlebars
cables can fly around and the hood fits right under your helmet so it doesn't fly away so that's
good and what color was yours yellow I think I said this last time you were here part of podcasting
is asking questions you know the answer to and I feel like that's similar to parenting don't you
agree I'm always asking questions and you're like you know what the answer is so would you recommend
the clever hood to other kids yeah and to parents yeah traveling the riding bikes yeah they're good
they're comfortable they're good for everything you're a lot less talkative than you were when
you were little does that happen when you turn 13 I don't know I've been 13 for like four months
all right well you'll tell me at the end of your time as a 13 year old maybe when you're 14 you'll
talk more who knows but did you know Zeb that listeners of the war and cars can save 15% off of
the best rain gear for cycling and walking and traveling and riding the fiber bike tour and
going to Disney World with code travel with me now through the end of June did you know that I did
not you didn't know that because you were sitting here while I was recording the rest of this episode
I didn't know that until then oh because you had your earbuds in and you were just playing on your
tablet okay we'll go to cleverhood.com slash war on cars and enter code travel with me
and you'll save 15% I don't think we really need to save 15% off on clever hoods we have so many
at home oh we don't need to save 15% off because Susan very nicely sent you one or two yes but
everybody else can go to cleverhood.com slash war on cars
so the next of the five D's is deliberative learning and to give people a little bit of
context I think we understand this in the terms of airplane crashes let's talk about deliberative
learning in the context of road safety airline safety is one of the resources I draw upon to
think about that and it's commonly said the reason why airlines are so safe is because when
things go wrong people aren't trying to kind of blame the pilot they're just trying to figure out
what what happened and stop it happening again the other way into this is restorative justice
from a kind of criminal justice angle this and the next kind of principle are ways of saying well
what when when stuff does go wrong when people are injured and killed on the road either in
particular fatalities or in a spate of incidents in a particular location what do we do and the
first thing I want to do is effectively gather together all the people who I think are in the
system who I think are responsible the car manufacturers the traffic engineers the police
I mean all all relevant actors as well as the the driver the driver car and their family and
the victims family so it has a bit of a feel of restorative justice gathering and I think the
purpose of that inquiry would be twofold one is a kind of public recognition of the violence and
the loss and as Peter Norton points out in his book fighting traffic in the 1920s there was much
more of that there were kind of officially recognized memorials to slain children put up in
American cities one of the marks of the fact that we've normalized road death is that that doesn't
happen anymore or if it does it happens informally like the victims families do it or the cycling
groups put up a ghost bike but we don't do it as a matter of it's not a public act of of morning
and loss and I think one way of denormalizing road death is to do a bit more public recognition
and acknowledgement of what's happened in situations where people are slain on the road
so the inquiry would have that function but it's also it would have a function akin to what goes on
in the airline industry we're trying to say the ways in which these kinds of cars are commonly
advertised as being kind of speed machines and to come to some kind of determination about how
this kind of incident can be prevented in the future and it's perfectly possible there may be
occasions where someone said look the driver was just staring at his mobile phone but and that
could be the outcome but that shouldn't be the starting point should be a
kind of environmental one what it was in this system in this layout that produced this death
and how can we stop it happening again although I would probably argue and I'm speaking up for
imagine a few listeners who are thinking this right now the driver staring at his or her phone
there are technology fixes that could solve that problem such as some sort of tech where you
disable your phone all but the most necessary features let's say maps or whatever it is
while you're driving the tech companies are perfectly capable of creating something where
it is impossible for you to use your text your messaging while you're driving so even there
you know the discussion of oh the driver was on their phone that should be the start of the
conversation not the end no exactly I was having a conversation with someone on Monday who was
describing to me hiring a car where the the Spotify feature on the music system came up
and it played the videos from the songs like like literally you're driving and the video
was showing here and I mean that's a perfect example of what you've just I mean apple car play
shows you how many text messages you have and there's that little red dot with the number in
there it is beckoning you to press on it and find out what that is that's just human nature
but I think you're totally right and that's why you want the car companies in the room
when these inquiries take place and we have experience with this because 1965 Ralph Nader
unsafe at any speed what did that book show that there were steering columns that weren't
collapsing during car crashes that were impaling drivers and what happened the car companies
through regulation had to redesign those columns so that they would collapse in the event of a
crash so we have experience with this here in the united states and elsewhere so the last of the
five days here is what you call disassembling dangerous actants I'm just going to let you
go for it I've read this multiple times now and it's super fascinating what do you mean by that
this for me is the practical payoff of treating the problem of road and safety as a question of
how you regulate driver cars not how you punish individuals human drivers the starting point
for this is let's take the conventional approach that often in our society
if if we think something is a is a serious problem that isn't being treated seriously enough
especially in when it comes to crime often what we want is more serious punishment there's too
much leniency and we want serious punishment and you get some of that in the road safety space and
I can kind of understand where it comes from but I think it's not the way to go and it's not the
way to go partly because I think it's difficult because it requires judges to see criminals
where they don't see criminals but also because it prioritizes the wrong thing to borrow a term
from the kind of transformative justice movement in the US as elsewhere that I think bad driving
should have consequences it need necessarily have punishment and the idea of disassembling the
dangerous actant looks something like this that there is a a combination of human and object
that has proven itself to be demonstrably dangerous it is run someone over it's killed someone in a
collision we should effectively in responding to that you never responding to it in a criminal
trial and someone has been convicted the first thing we should do is do safety work to ask
itself the question how can we act on that that hybrid object in order to stop this happening again
and it seems to me you can go one of two ways here you can act on the human part of that hybrid
the way I cash this out is to say that we should make license suspension and revocation
a much more prevalent and commonly utilized way in which we respond to to risk and danger on the
road at the moment in England and Wales it comes last and it feels like a kind of afterthought after
the punishment has happened and justices have found themselves very reluctant to take people's
driving license often for all sorts of reasons to do with motor normativity I was about to say
we talked about this very thing with Ian Walker in that in many places having your license taken
away is seen as a punishment worse than a prison sentence that you're essentially saying to the
person you may not participate in society anymore and that's why judges are reluctant to do it so
I think we should do that much more often than we do we should do it earlier for short periods of
time and we should do it for extended periods of time in the most serious cases and obviously we
need to think carefully about how that operates in practice it's a very different experience
losing your driving license if you live in New York than it is if you live in rural Ontario
so so one has to think about the kind of differential effects but I think that we should
be much less cautious than we are currently about doing that but at the same time we can act on the
vehicle that there's all kinds of things that we can do to vehicles to make them less dangerous
we can put black boxes in them we can put technology in them that means they can't be
started without passing a breath test for alcohol as Peter Norton also points out the speed governor
was an available form of technology back in the 1920s there are now forms of intelligence-based
speed assistance that can tie cars to the prevailing speed limit in the environment
so my thought is that we want sentences to flip it to flip what they currently do
and do that first do the future safety work and do it in order to prevent future risks
and if having done that I've had some pushback from road safety campaigners who've read the article
yeah what's what's the pushback the pushback is are you really trying to say that this driver
is driven dangerously and killed a child and you don't think they should go to prison for a very
long time I can kind of see why people feel that especially if they've lost loved ones to dangerous
drivers it's not my position that punishment is never appropriate but I think we should be clear
what we're doing when we punish that we're we're enacting that punishment because we're angry
with someone because of the harm they've caused yeah not because we think it's going to generate
safer roads I think a lot of this comes down again to moto normativity you know we had an issue
as safe street campaigners and activists here in that we would find that our former mayor bill
de Blasio was very much in favor of speed cameras red light cameras things like that which was great
and we were grateful for his support but anything that would take other privileges from drivers such
as parking road space things like that to actually slow drivers down was seen as an imposition and
I think what was at the core of that was that when a driver gets a ticket for speeding that's a bad
actor doing a bad thing and they deserve punishment when we take parking and road space from drivers
you're harming everybody else who are not seen as bad drivers or bad people and so
I think that that's kind of the pushback also that happens is that of course we should send
that person who killed a child to prison they're a bad person who did a bad thing but I confronted
bill de Blasio on that very philosophy when two children were killed in our neighborhood and what
I said was you know I'm not saying people shouldn't receive consequences and punishment for when they
do something egregiously bad but I don't want the driver who killed my children to go to prison
I want my children to not be killed by the driver that's the goal where we have to start
so there are some efforts towards that goal here in New York state for example the stop
superspeeders act which was just passed by the New York state legislature would stop the so-called
superspeeders by forcing drivers who have 16 or more school zone speed camera violations in 12
months it would force them to put a speed governor in their car and then have that speed governor
in the car for at least another year after it's installed so there are some moves towards that
where you know we can debate whether 16 is too high and it probably should come earlier but
it is a new way of thinking about harm prevention and consequences for drivers yeah I was interesting
I think I was reading last week the French government have introduced a measure to make
license suspension and immediate consequence of driving while looking at a mobile phone
so there are clearly things in the general area that I'm trying to describe happening
and as you mentioned I mean some of those suspensions could be you lose your license for a
month it's not a permanent revocation you know it depends on the offense of course I think that's
like they could be very short periods of suspension but equally in the most
egregious cases where people have just driven in ways which are just criminally responsible and
taken the lie I kind of feel more comfortable with that person never driving again than I do with
sending them to prison you know kind of way and at the very least the more general point I'm trying
to make is that we flip what sentences currently do do the safety work first if at that point
they decide that some quotient of punishment is still required for Richard then do that and I
didn't come to a view on what that should look like I just think it should be secondary to
what really matters if we're interested in safe roads and so as you mentioned and as you write
in the study we need to think of this not as a center for past behavior but protection against
future risk and one of the parts that I loved about this section was in talking about license
suspension or revocation that we understand it not as the punitive removal of a quote unquote
right to drive but as the withdrawal of special permission to operate hazardous machinery which
itself is a radical reconceptualization of driving you know we think of driving as just a
human going from point a to point b but it's not number one if we're to go back to the hybrid
actants thing it's something other than human going from point a to point b but at its very basic
level it is a human being operating heavy and dangerous machinery on public roads in public
space with exposure to other people for public harm exactly one of the basic things that we
forget about driving is that driving a car is illegal one of the things that's distinguished
from cycling driving a car only becomes illegal under a very specific set of circumstances some
of which pertain to the car it has to be safe in various ways and some of which pertain to the
driver they have to be trained they have to have a license in other words they have to have been
granted permission to operate that car by the state and I think if you've been demonstrably
unable to operate that object safely I don't see why we shouldn't remove that permission
and as you write we're talking then about disqualification not punishment and it pertains
as you say to special skills subject to licensing and extensive regulation with services having
a fiduciary character in this case perhaps to other road users in relation to people
having substantial vulnerability which I just think is a really great way to frame this and that
we are rethinking thanks to your study and I really encourage people to read it the very nature of
driving itself which is a thing we have to get at if we're going to fix this problem so I think
in summary I was thinking about this before I came on the standard chain of logic with how we deal
with road safety at the moment goes something like this the driving is basically safe it only
becomes unsafe if individuals do it dangerously and that therefore the chain of intervention
goes something like individual responsibility enforcement punishment my alternative goes
something like that the starting point is that mass motoring is a system of harm production
even when people are driving carefully and considerably and the chain of intervention
should be start with systems think about infrastructure and then bad driving has consequences
not necessarily punishment professor Ian Loder thank you so much for joining the war on cars
this study is one of the more fascinating ones I have read in all my years of doing the podcast
and doing this work and I thank you so much for putting into words things that I think a lot of
us have been struggling with for a long time it's been an absolute pleasure
that's it for this episode of the war on cars once again I want to thank professor Ian Loder
for joining me I will put links to his study and more of his research in the show notes remember
if you like what we do here at the war on cars please become a patreon supporter at patreon.com
slash the war on cars pod you want to thank everyone who makes the war on cars possible
including our top contributors charlie g of human powered law in portland oregon
mark headland virginia baker brandon de coaster and dave shellnut the biking lawyer llp in toronto
canada and please pick up a copy of our book life after cars freeing ourselves from the tyranny
of the automobile wherever you get your books you can learn more at lifeaftercars.com thanks
also to our friends at cleverhood listeners of the war on cars can save 15 off the best
rain gear for cycling and walking now through the end of june with code travel with me just go
to cleverhood.com slash war on cars thanks also to upway you can save $100 off your purchase
of a certified pre-owned e-bike of $800 or more with code TWOC 100 i'll put a link in the show
notes the war on cars is produced with the support of the helen and william mazer foundation
this episode was recorded at the brooklyn podcasting studio by josh wilcox it was edited by yasenia
our theme music is by nathaniel goodyear transcripts are by russell grad our logo
is by danie finkel i'm doug gordon and on behalf of my co-host sarah goodyear this is the war on cars
you
About this episode
The hosts and guest Ian Loder challenge how the legal system treats driver-caused deaths, arguing that “motornormativity” and “motornormative punishment” make car harm seem more acceptable than violence from other contexts. They reframe road danger as a system of harm produced by automobility—shaped by infrastructure, technology, and distributed responsibility—rather than as a problem solved by blaming and imprisoning individual “bad drivers.” The conversation also highlights prevention-first consequences like earlier license suspension and vehicle safety tech.
Original notes
What should happen to drivers who kill or injure someone with their car? Does a focus on punishment for "reckless" or "dangerous" drivers let everyone else off the hook and never force them to look at the larger harms of a transportation system based around personal car ownership? Those are the questions asked by Ian Loader, a professor of criminology at the University of Oxford, who argues that the law's focus on "motonormative punishment" is just another way of masking the larger problems caused by a car-dominant society. In a new study, Professor Loader proposes a vastly different way of thinking about criminal punishment organized around five harm reduction principles. Plus, is it really wrong for news outlets to write headlines like "Pedestrian Hit By Car," or is there more to it than advocates are willing to admit?
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SHOW NOTES:
Read Professor Ian Loader's study, "Beyond Motonormative Punishment: On Road Safety as Environmental Regulation."
Curious about motonormativity? Listen to our episode with Dr. Ian Walker, who coined the term.
Learn more about the concept in our episode with Dr. Tara Goddard and our episode with Marco te Brömmelstroet.
Order our book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, out now from Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Buy a certified, pre-owned e-bike from Upway and save $100 off any purchase of $800 or more with code TWOC100. Visit Upway.co to get rolling.
Thanks also to Cleverhood. Listen to this episode for the latest discount code and get 15% off the best rain gear for walking and cycling.
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