Beyond motonormative punishment: on road safety as environmental regulation

Journal article

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 paper, 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 culture of blame that focuses on the individualised 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 organised around five harm reduction principles: diversion, design, distributed agency, deliberative learning, and the disassembly of dangerous actants.

Authors: Loader, I

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: British Journal of Criminology
• Publication date: 2026-06-10
• Acceptance date: 2026-03-14
• DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azag026
• EISSN: 1464-3529
• ISSN: 0007-0955
• Language: English