Abstract 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.
Ian Loader (Mon,) studied this question.