Volume 4, Issue 2: Fall 2008

Book Review

Mobility Without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship
By Jeremy Packer
Duke University Press, 2008
ISBN-10: 0-8223-0-8223
ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3963-2

Steven E. Alford

Reading a book on traffic safety would seem to most to be a cure for insomnia.  However, Jeremy Packer’s Mobility Without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship may well keep you up past your bedtime.   

This ambitious book sees to understand how the concept of “safety” has been employed by institutions, especially governmental agencies, to control various groups within the American population, including motorcyclists.  These groups are separated from the rest of the population by a particular marker (sex, skin color, transportation choice), characterized as a group, and “profiled.” As Packer notes with regard to “African-Americans, Latinos, hitchhikers, and motorcyclists, profiling is not simply a violation of individual rights, but an attack on the very mechanism through which these groups build, perform, and negotiate their cultural identities and their place in the larger society.”

Obviously, any rational person would be interested in being safe while being mobile.  But Packer explores the mechanisms of insuring public safety and finds more interests than simply keeping Americans alive and well.  “Most generally, … safety has been used to legitimate a number of restrictive measures on the mobility of subjugated populations for the past 50 years and more. … This by no means undermined the relative gains made in the survival rate in traffic accidents or the number of fatalities per million miles driven (the most widely used statistical measure). It does, however, seriously call into question the legitimacy of safety as the only benchmark for determining policy initiatives regarding automobility.”

Packer suggests that “mobility” reveals hidden political and cultural relationships among citizens and their society, in this case “through an analysis of how driving has been understood by experts, imagined by citizens, regulated by traffic law, governed through education and propaganda, and represented in mass-mediated popular culture such as film, television, magazines, and newspapers.”

In addition to Packer’s obvious intellectual sophistication, what sets this book apart is its method, drawn from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault and others (such as Giles Deleuze).  Packer uses Foucault’s concept of “a genealogy of the power/knowledge relationships” that have organized and regulated ‘different populations’ access to and use of automobility.”

Covering the years 1946 (the year of President Harry Truman’s first Highway Safety Conference), to 2005 (when mobility was reconceived not as a safety issue but as a national security issue), Packer looks at seven different manifestations of safety and governmental control.  Beginning with Whitney’s Man and Motorcar (a traffic safety manual), he notes that from its inception, institutional concerns about citizens’ mobility have been infused with ideology.  For Whitney, for example, becoming a good driver was part of being a good citizen.  Flouting the expectations of being a “safe driver” meant not recognizing one’s civic responsibilities.  In subsequent chapters Packer looks at hitchhikers, motorcyclists, the CB/trucker phenomenon, the “racialization” of the Cadillac, road rage, and, finally, how concern with public safety has shifted recently to concern for national security.

The government, he argues, has never been concerned with the individual “safe driver,” but with groups that are seen to be a threat to the safety of others: “safe and risky come to be characterized through group or demographic identity.  In other words, it is not simply that specific drivers are viewed as unsafe, but rather whole demographic categories, historically disenfranchised, have been described by experts and represented in the mass media as hopelessly dangerous.”  And, as you might imagine, the principal groups under scrutiny have been women, youths, and African Americans.

As others have noted, the media plays a role in this group characterization. “There has been no necessary correspondence between the statistically determined relative risk of hitchhiking and motorcycle riding and the extent of media coverage, the level of social concern, and the degree of governmental response these activities have received.”  Yet, owing to the public’s interest in “deviance,” the threat to bourgeois values, exploited by exaggerated media accounts, becomes characterized through the lens of safety.

One way of controlling a group population is to claim that its “risky behavior” threatens the more general population, whether through direct danger to themselves, to others, or indirectly, such as the threat of rising insurance rates.  However, as Packer notes, “risk” is not an objective concept. “Risk is neither wholly physically ‘out there’ nor fully produced ‘in culture.’  Risk would seem to both preexist and escape human perception and has therefore been misunderstood by science, misrepresented by the media, and misapplied by the law.”

Take, for example, speed, near and dear to motorcyclists, but often seen by non-riders as a threat.  Packer notes that “speeding does not necessarily cause harm.  It may be imagined that it could or will under certain circumstances cause harm, but unto itself it does not.  Rather than criminalizing actions based on their effects, automobile conduct is largely criminalized according to the possibility that it may cause harm.  Potentiality is made criminal.”  Hence, speed is not in itself a criminal act, but one which has the potential to endanger others.  Given the visibility of motorcyclists and their interest in speed, they can be singled out.  “Risk analysis can be used with great impunity to criminalize some potential dangers while largely ignoring others.”

In this country, as elsewhere around the world, from its inception the motorcycle was adopted as a form of transportation mainly because it was economical.  The salary-challenged used the motorcycle as a cheap form of transport.  However, at a certain point in our history the motorcycle was reconfigured as “dangerous.”  Why?  “The motorcycle for some time was generally viewed in terms of its economic viability, not in terms of the danger it posed to self or society.  In the 1950s this changed in a hurry largely because of who were seen to be the new motorcycle riders.”  Hence, the motorcycle itself was not seen to be dangerous, but a category of riders—in this case returning war veterans—were seen to be a dangerous group of citizens, based on their appearance and behavior.  The visibility of the motorcycle, their transport choice, gave the government, in tandem with the media, the supposed justification for singling out the “outlaws” as an identifiable group that threatened other citizens owing to their lack of “safety.”

Ironically, this view shifted again, not when motorcycle driving behavior changed, but when the demographics of the motorcyclist changed. “In a general sense, since motorcycling is a less efficient mode of transportation and less useful to commerce, it can be outlawed.  It is only when it becomes a highly fetishized object of middle-class consumption in the 1980s that it is granted a semblance of mainstream acceptability.”  One could also argue that we are currently witnessing a further shift—backwards—in the perception of the “danger” of motorcycling now that so many young people are taking to the roads on high performance sport bikes.  It may well be that a new “danger” has emerged, thrill-seeking young people riding at excessive speeds on our interstates, endangering our law-abiding citizenry in their SUVs.

Increasing insurance rates and police surveillance, establishing age groups qualified to ride certain types of bikes, not allowing bikers to gather in certain places, all may be seen as a response to the seeming increase in unsafe behaviors by bikers everywhere.  As Packer points out, arguing that motorcyclists are an increasing threat to public safety may rest more on improperly massaging statistics than in observing any real danger.

It is easier to ignore, and in some instances relish, motorcyclists’ deaths when the riders are thought to be ‘dirty, rough-neck, outlaw types’ than when they are thought to be the progeny of postwar suburban bliss.  This may help explain why there was a shift from acceptance of 1,103 motorcycle deaths in 1949 to outrage in 1964 when there were 1,118 deaths; in those same years, the number of registered motorcycles rose from 478,851 to 984,760.  The number of deaths increased only 1.3 percent while the number of bikes increased 105 percent.  What changed was not the actual risk of riding a bike; in fact, it was seemingly only half as risky, judging from the increase in actual bikes on the road in proportion to the slight increase in deaths.

Just as insurance companies benefit from the public and the media’s willingness to characterize bikers as “other,” a number of groups benefit from the designation of motorcycling as “risky,” not least of which are bikers themselves. “Riding needs to seem incredibly dangerous, not only for the protective clothing manufacturers to survive, but also to legitimate the regulations placed on motorcycling and, most important, for some, in order that those riding can be gratified by their inclusion into the category of risk taker.”

Yet, as we riders know, there is no such thing as a “biker.”   “There are numerous relationships to motorcycling, and they are neither unified nor ahistorical.”  Women, young people, proletarians, rich urban bikers (RUBs) and, dare we say it, scooterists all enjoy two wheels for reasons, some definable and some ineffable, that demonstrate how riding enhances their lives.  To characterize them as a group, or to argue, as some motorcyclists do, that some people are “real bikers” while others are not, uses the same conceptual tools as the government and the insurance industry to classify, divide and conquer us both economically and with respect to our personal freedoms.

In his final chapter, Packer provides a helpful and scary look into the transformation of safety discourse into security discourse following 9/11.  While initially traversing space could be surveilled and controlled under the rationale of “safety,” political and economic control over our movements as citizens is now seen as justified owing to concerns with “security.”  Hence, “the problem posed by transportation technologies and their attendant citizen subjects was not only their mobility per se, but rather whether it would create a problem in ensuring safe travel. In what has been described as the new normal, a state of perpetual war, the subject is no longer treated as a becoming accident, but a becoming bomb. … Space is not a minefield; mobility is a mine.”

While this review has focused, for obvious reasons, on Packer’s discussion of the motorcycle as an object of ideological control, Mobility Without Mayhem is a rich resource for those interested in other forms of mobility, such as hitchhiking, other social aspects of mobility, such as the conflict over the “Blackness” of the American Cadillac, or the psychology of “road rage.”  Packer’s informed and nuanced exploration of the relation of mobility to ideology in postwar America is comprehensive, provocative, and instructive.  Check it out.

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