Beyond technical fixes
Vulnerable mobility and the affective governance of safety
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24217317 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Francis Chia Hui Lin (National Taiwan University) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-18 |
| Publication date | 2026-09-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Mobilities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1745-0101 • E-ISSN: 1745-011X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17450101.2026.2736647 |
| OpenAlex | W7214450206 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 32 |
Road safety interventions are increasingly guided by systemic models such as Vision Zero and the Safe System paradigm. Yet the institutional coherence presumed by these frameworks often breaks down in postcolonial governance environments. This article develops an epistemology of vulnerable mobility to explain how safety is governed in Taiwan, where infrastructural danger persists despite continual legal amendments and behaviour-focused campaigns. Drawing on seventy-six Legislative Yuan Research Reports and twenty-five state and quasi-state safety education materials, the analysis shows that vulnerability is not only an outcome of risk exposure but a governing logic that legitimises affective, symbolic, and incremental interventions. Legal reforms exhibit a form of micro-historicity, signalling responsiveness without enabling structural redesign, whilst pedagogical infrastructures cultivate vigilance, caution, and personalised responsibility among vulnerable road users. Read through a mobilities lens, vulnerability is conceptualised not as a user attribute but as a governing condition through which movement is sensed, regulated, and normalised. This governance through affect emerges from Taiwan’s historically layered mobility regime, shaped by colonial spatial rationalisation, authoritarian legal legacies, and democratic improvisation. Beyond Taiwan, the article contributes to mobilities scholarship by showing how safety operates as the governance of feeling rather than the elimination of risk.
affective governance · legal reform · postcolonial governance · road safety governance · safety education · Taiwan · Vision Zero · vulnerable road users · Traffic and Road Safety · Transportation Systems and Logistics · Urban Transport and Accessibility
Transit Life
Mobility
Learning the City
Mobile Communications, Social Networks, and Urban Travel
Car free cities
Staging Mobilities
Undoing Gender
Development and Deployment of Public Transport Policy and Planning in Taiwan
Law and Disorder in the Postcolony
Walking against or with traffic? Evaluating pedestrian fatalities and head injuries in Taiwan
When the force of public opinion gathers”
The sources of the Kuznets relationship between road fatalities and economic growth
Gender, urban space, and the right to everyday life
Women’s Political Empowerment
Democracy, Women's Political Empowerment, and Road Safety
Thinking complex interconnections
Governing emergencies
Micropolitics of Mobility
On the Postcolony
Attribution And Accountability
Mobility Infrastructures
Historical geographies of Japanese colonial urbanism
Towards a Politics of Mobility
The City as Assemblage
Slumdog Cities
The Ethnography of Infrastructure
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
| Highly cited | No |
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