Beyond motonormative punishment
On road safety as environmental regulation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8401629 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ian Loader (0000-0002-6419-0486, University of Oxford, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The British Journal of Criminology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-0955 • E-ISSN: 1464-3529 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/bjc/azag026 |
| OpenAlex | W7143518960 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 38 |
Criminology has a blind spot concerning road safety. The field tends to accept that the problem is best left to technical specialists; treats road safety as separate from its focal concerns with public safety; and reproduces an ideology of streets as distinct socio-juridical spaces. In so doing, criminology leaves unaddressed a significant dimension of the question of how to create safe and liveable urban environments. In this article, I set out to unsettle these distinctions. I begin with a brief historical and geographic sketch of the forms of violence and harm associated with car systems. I then offer a critique of what I term ‘motonormative punishment’—a mix of legal sanctions and a culture of blame that focuses on the individualized responsibility of a minority of ‘careless’ or ‘dangerous’ drivers while accommodating the structural violence generated by regimes of automobility. I argue, instead, for theorizing road safety in terms of diffused responsibility between actors and hybrid actants in a system. It follows, I conclude, that we should radically decentre criminal punishment as a response to road violence in favour of forms of environmental regulation organized around five harm reduction principles: diversion, design, distributed agency, deliberative learning and the disassembly of dangerous actants
Blame · Dimension (graph theory) · Harm · Ideology · Punishment (psychology) · Sanctions · Set (abstract data type) · Sketch · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Urban Planning and Governance · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses
Policing Distracted Driving
Provisional Authority
Everyday Law on the Street
Fighting Traffic
Punishment and Modern Society
Car harm
Concerning Cars
Automobility violence
The political economy of car dependence
Inescapable objects? Automobility and everyday disorder in an English town
Data Sharing
Investigating prison suicides
Bikes and bodies
Mobility freedoms
Mother, what did policemen do when there weren't any motors?’ The law, the police and the regulation of motor traffic in England, 1900–1939
Simulated Justice
Situational” Crime Prevention
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
Why punishment pleases
Governing-through-Harm and Public Goods Policing
The vermin of the street
The City and the Car
EVs Are Not the Answer
Mobility and Safety
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |