Professor Ian Loader, University of Oxford

Hello and welcome to this latest edition of "The Project Edward Podcast, My Role in the Safe System". And we're at All Souls College Oxford for this episode. I'm excited and delighted to meet Professor Ian Loeder, Professor of Criminology and Profisorial Fellow of All Souls College and a Fellow of the British Academy. He's one of Britain's most eminent criminologists, and his career has spanned policing, penal policy and public attitudes to crime. In recent years, he's turned his attention to a radical new question, which is what brings us here. What does the car tell us about crime, harm and justice? His leave of human trust major research fellowship, running until 2028, pursues the project "Car Harms, Automobility and the Objects of Criminology" and his landmark paper "Beyond Motor Normative Punishment", published in the British Journal of Criminology in 2026, is already reshaping how we think about road safety, law and regulation. Ian, I hope that's sort of accurate, is it? You've got a lot to let us down to live up to. I like the sound of that. I'll do my best to live up to it. Well, look, I think the important thing now is to start by working out what has drawn a distinguished criminologist to the car as a subject. Was there a moment of revelation? I think there may have been a moment, but I'll come back to that. So some of this is continuity. So about 15 years ago, I used to teach a graduate class on criminological theory. And I got into the habit of using examples from driving to kind of illustrate various criminological theories. And I think, and I still to this day, I think that's helpful thing to do. Because it draws into question, various distinctions that we tend to make between who are offenders and who are law-biding, how we think about victimisation, what we think animates people to offend or not offend, how offending is distributed across the population. And when you think about motoring, because motoring involves kind of effectively mass law-breaking committed every day by people who generally consider themselves to be law-abiding citizens, it kind of calls into doubt lots of that. So that's one continuity. I think the other continuity is that I've always been interested in cities and how cities work and order and disorder and crime and violence in cities. And one of the things I now puzzle over is why criminologists have written about cities for 100 years and kind of not really factored into their analysis, the ways in which cities are effectively made for people to get around, to get around using motorised transport. And that has all kinds of implications for how we think about crime. So those are the continuities. I think the two other things that happened over the last few years, I've been researching a town called Maxwell, North of England. I've done some of your listeners made know it. It's just outside Manchester. And we were a repeat of a study we've been in the mid-1990s. And we were interested in how crime affects people's everyday lives and how they think about safety. So back in the 1990s, when we talked about these questions, people would tell us they were worried about car theft or car damage or being worried about, you know, annoyed about being caught for speeding. But that was how the car featured in the discussions. 25 years on, we went back. And much to our surprise, because we didn't ask about this. We just asked people about what makes them feel safe and unsafe in the neighbourhoods and streets in which they live. The whole series of questions about the car came up to do with, no, speeding on residential roads, to do with air pollution, to do with badly parked vehicles, to do with conflict at the school run, because people were trying to drive their kids to school in kind of cramped streets. So we wrote a whole chapter of the book that we wrote on this study about that. And it kind of got me thinking about the kind of the ways in which we as cramlogists are in the business of analysing something called public safety. That we think a lot about what it means to create neighbourhoods and environments in which people feel safe. But we've neglected to think about road safety as part of that bigger question. And the more I think about that, I think it's really puzzling. And part of the ambition of the project and the paper you mentioned is to try and kind of, in a sense, blur those distinctions. In the midst of all that, there probably was a moment. And I think somewhere in the midst of all that, you just look around you in the course of your daily lives. And you just kind of ask yourself the question, no, why do we get around like this? No, why do we allow these objects to take up just so much space in our environments? And just structure the way in which everyone has to kind of routinely think about that these vehicles and how they get around, even if you're not in them in terms of, no, how you cross the road, where you can cross the road, the fact that you so many environments in which you walk or cycle, you're having to constantly pay attention to the threat of road traffic. Now you call the car one of the most criminogenic and harmful devices ever invented. So I think I need you to help unpack that provocation for us. It's a deliberate provocation, and I mean it totally seriously. It's a provocation because it's meant to disrupt the ways in which culturally that we tend to think about cars in our lives. So cars get promoted by the car industry and advertisers. And to some extent purchase and enjoy by many of their users in terms of ideas like, you know, freedom and status, this is a mark of success. This allows me to conveniently get around, get my family around. So there's all kinds of positive associations that for which a whole industry exists to try and continue to impress them upon this. What the idea of injecting into this discussion, the idea that the car is a harmful object, is meant to be a disruption to that positive association, and to kind of reminder of all that we kind of deny and refuse when we celebrate the car in the way that modern cultures have come to do so. And some of that is about crime. Some of it is very directly about crime. I mean, around 60% of the offenses in British courts in the last year were motoring offenses. I mean, at one level though, the car has generated mass law breaking on an everyday basis. There's all kinds of ways in which we don't treat it very seriously, which we might get to. But there's no denying that it happens. Right from the get-go, police departments worried about the effects of cars on criminal activity because cars effectively meant that criminals could, they could drive further, they could get away from the scenes of criminal activity, they could hide the proceeds of criminal activity in the boot and so on and so forth. There's all kinds of ways in which even if you think in standard criminological terms, the car transformed patterns and distribution and the possibilities for criminal activity and of course the way in which the police organised themselves to respond to that. But I think when I mean harm, I kind of means something else. On this planet, 1.3 million people a year get killed in motor collisions. About 50 million get seriously injured. They're staggering. One level, they are staggering numbers. The motor car is the biggest single killer of children and young people, basically 5 and 29 on planet earth. By any measure, that seems to me to be a mark of an object, which is an object of harm, of injury, of violence, of death. And I think we need to kind of, I don't know, sense what the project's trying to do, is to kind of factor that into the ways in which we think about this form of mobility in ways to get away from the tendency to kind of neglect or deny or kind of just overlook that aspect. Of the cars impact on people's lives. You use a word motor normativity. What is it? And how does it warp our legal and cultural response to road harm? Okay, motor normativity is a term coined by Ian Walker, who's an environmentalist, he cults psychologists to works at the University of Swansea. And I think what he means by it is a set of kind of unconscious and kind of collective assumptions that we all make that getting around by private car either is or should be the way in which we travel. So either it is, it's just a stubborn fact about our world that we just have to live with, we can't do anything about it, or it should be that there's all kinds of virtues and freedoms and convenience that comes from the car and that we should make that central to what we do. And the reason he thinks this matters is he says and he's done some experiments that kind of some surveys that demonstrate this. He says that that background assumption means that we make different kinds of judgments and tolerate different kinds of risks in context of motoring that we judge to be unacceptable in other context. So one of the questions he asks is about the difference between people's toleration of smoking at the school gate and cars idling at the school gate tends to find that people are more tolerant of cars. And what the thing I do in the paper you mentioned is to kind of think about the question of the ways in which those kinds of unconscious assumptions towards the kind of centrality or normality of cars as the way we get around might be baked into way in which the law treats motoring offenders. You argue that even attentive law abiding driving is dangerous. So how should that perhaps change the way members of our audience who are the road safety professionals, the policy makers and the police. I hope there's representatives of you all listening anyway. How does that change how they should be thinking about their mission? Can I just scroll back to the ways in which this will get to answer the question? The ways in which I worry that motor normativity shapes legal responses to crime. One is, I mean, there's been a worry for many, many decades that relevant people, judges, sentences, magistrates, confronted with a moting offender. They assallocate what's put it. They struggle to see the criminality. In other words, they don't see an offender. They see a person who's kind of made a mistake which has had faith in them. consequences and at some level they're looking at the person in their doctor and they're thinking that could have been me, that could have been my partner, that could have been a member of my family and that person doesn't fit very easily into the kind of operative stereotype of what an offender or a offender is supposed to look like and the worry is that it has all kinds of consequences for the ways in which the law treats motoring offenders and the suggestion or on this requires further investigation is that we therefore think less seriously about violence and injury and death inflicted by a motor vehicle than judges would if by injury and death committed by with by other kinds of people using other kinds of objects, knives, guns, blunt instruments and so on and so forth. So that's one worry. The second worry in this rate to the question you just asked is I think that that one of the things that that that law does is to focus our attention when we think about road safety and road danger on the individual driver who has made a mistake or has been inebriated or has but driven carelessly or recklessly and organize our response in ways that focused on that driver and sanctioning and a portioning blame to that person. In ways that send the kind of reassuring message to the rest of us that road safety is not it's not it's not it's nothing to do with us. In other words it sustains the illusion that driving is safe and it only becomes dangerous at the margins. When it's when it's being performed by someone who is driving carelessly or recklessly or speeds or is inebriated or looks at their mobile phone when they should be paying attention to the road and I think the so I think that's that that's one of that's part of law's work here and one of the things I want to kind of call into question is that assumption and I I think I start from a different starting point which is if you're going to drive two tongue machines around at reasonable speed especially in areas where people are walking cycling playing working and so on and so forth that activity is by definition dangerous and that we need to think about it and respond to it like that rather than assuming it is safe and only dangerous at the margins. Let's turn our attention to the Leaver Hume Trust research fellowship I think there's been a paper coming out of that early days yet but tell us a bit about it. I think the paper is an attempt to rethink the ways in which we conceptualize road safety or road harm and the ways in which we the law responds to it and I think the argument in that show is this at the moment the predominant response that we make to questions about road safety is focused on individuals it's focused on enforcement and it's focused on the punishment of bad or reckless or careless driving and that we we organize the response to road danger in that way because we operate with this assumption that for the most part driving is safe and it's only dangerous at the margins. If you operate from the the assumption that I think we should start from that all drive that driving is per se a dangerous activity moving around at speed in a two-tone machine is a dangerous activity that I think we should prioritize other things so we should prioritize systems rather than individuals we should think about infrastructure before we think about enforcement and that bad or driving should have consequences but those consequences should not necessarily or in the first place to be punishment. Are there any places examples or locations where that's happening now and you can show look this is infrastructure that's correct and therefore this road doesn't need enforcement. Well I mean there's a two example I mean one is to some extent that some of that is already reflected in kind of vision zero principles that some of your listeners may be familiar with. I think 20 might default 20 mile hour speed limits are a good example of this. The Dutch apparently have a saying that if people are regularly speeding on a particular stretch of road the problem is not the people speeding it's the problem is the people who designed the road and the the solution is to redesign the road so that people can't speed and that's the kind of small example of where I think that we need to do we need much more clearly to do prevention work focused on creating in creating safe environments in which road harm is reduced rather than creating environments that are dangerous and then pinning the blame on the driver when things go wrong. I've got ridden down here in the five D's but I'll let you talk me through the five D's. Okay so so the paper ends with an attempt to kind of set out an alternative way of dealing with with road harm and I elaborate on five different principles all of which I've cleverly managed to get to begin with D. So let me briefly explain what what they each are. The first is diversion and diversion is a criminal justice term for keeping people away from the criminal justice system. I mean by it something different here. I think if you want to treat the kind if you want to be serious about reducing the harms of mass motoring you have to find ways of basically reducing the amount that people drive and that means reducing the kind of tonnage of cars on the road and it means reducing the amount of aggregate driving in the population and I think that I mean that effectively means and there are some places in the country that have done this but set it that making it an object of public policy to reduce the amount of car trips and car miles driven in a given population and there's all kinds of ways you can think about doing that which take me well beyond the paper which is largely about trying to put in place accessible alternatives to driving for many of the trips that are currently taken by car but the point is I think that we need that if you start from the assumption that this is a harmful activity that becomes in a sense the first priority. In the same way if you if you want to reduce injury and death from smoking there's all sorts of things you can do with the cigarette to make it less dangerous but ultimately you've got to reduce the number of people smoking I think something analogous happens in relation to car harm so that's diversion. Design is a basically means that we need to attend more first and foremost to the safety both of the product that's being driven around the vehicle and the environments in which they're driven around. I mean we do this already to some extent cars and all kinds of ways new cars have become safer they have clever braking systems and they correct poor driver behavior and so on and so forth but there are also a number of important counter trends in that respect one of which is that cars are getting heavier and bigger as a kind of secular trend in the car industry and that and we need to be clear about that the car industry is knowingly producing and selling objects that are demonstrably more dangerous than smaller cars so thinking about how you regulate what sometimes gets called car spreading is an aspect of design I think the other aspect of design is just thinking about the kind of architecture or the infrastructures in which and which cars are able to go no in terms of no at what speed having areas of the city where they might not be able to go to think about things like low traffic neighborhoods to think about kind of road narrowing there's all kinds of ways in which you can just create environments that are just safer and I think which basically operationalize the principle especially thinking about towns and cities where we treat it's not that it's not that you don't want cars to be present but you want cars to be guests in a territory of other people what I think we've created the world where we've allowed cars to be owners and everyone else has to make adjustments and if you flip that around and if you start from the principle that cars should be guests I think you start the look and feel of cities starts to become very different that's two distributed agency it's a fancy way of saying that at the moment for reasons that I've just alluded to we kind of pin responsibility for road injury and death on the driver and the driver of a loan in a ways that makes everyone else think I'm I drive safe least nothing really to do with me where I think we need to think about motoring as a kind of system in which all kinds of actors are involved from from car manufacturers to advertisers to traffic engineers to police to health services to drivers and so on and so forth and we need to think about the ways in which the kind of responsibility and accountability for producing mobility systems in which are safe for people inside cars and people outside of them falls to all those people and we need to think about road safety in those terms as being distributed inside that I think we I think I think we misunderstand the nature of the thing that we're trying to kind of control or regulate so at the moment we do one of we we assume that there is an individual driver human driving exercise in control over an object and we pin responsibility on them I actually think I explain this in the paper, that actually when a human drives a car, a new entity is created in the world, which is different from the human when they're not driving a car and is different from a car when it's parked on the street. And that actually, that the combination of human and object creates a new and novel and distinctively risky thing that we could do worse than actually describe accurately as a driver, a driver, a iPhone car. It's a hybrid actant, which is part human and part object. Now that all sounds very fancy, but it has all kinds of practical consequences for how we think about the regulation of road safety, because we're effectively, it seems to me, trying to regulate that hybrid object, not regulate how human beings drive. It's more evil than the sum of its parts. It's a different thing, and we're, and it's a thing with a particular kind of agency, and we're not used to thinking like that because we generally think that only human beings have agency and objects don't. But when you put humans in combination with a particular kind of object, I think a vera, a new thing is created in the world, which has a particular kind of risk associated with it. And that's the object that we're trying to, that's the kind of hybrid object that we're effectively trying to regulate. So that's the distributed agency. Deliberative learning is the fourth principle. We do bits of this already. So, I mean, so the analogy I use in the paper was the aircraft industry. It's commonly said that one of the reasons that the aircraft flying is so safe is that when things go wrong, as they occasionally do in flying, the first instinct is not to say, "Oh, who made a mistake in how can we get them?" It's to say, "What happened and how can we stop it happening in the future?" And I think that kind of preventative, collective learning logic is what we need to apply to road safety. And to some extent, we do bits of this already. The coroner's courts are a bit like this because coroners can make prevention of future death reports. So there's a bit of that. But the other bit I want to append to that is a criminal justice idea called restorative justice. So the idea of deliberative learning is that basically, in response to a road fatality, or in response to say a known street or area which is not even, even arguably a city, which has a particular kind of pattern of road death, you would conduct an inquiry where you would gather all those, no, all those I've just described as being responsible actors in the system together, to do two things. I think firstly, to publicly acknowledge the loss. There's a great book by Peter Norman called Fighting Traffic, which is about what happened in 1920s America when the car first emerged on American streets. And you describe the ways in which it's kind of battling shoes, basically for the control of the streets, in the context of which mass slaughter took place. And he points out that it was quite common in the 1920s for memorials to be erected. Official memorials to be erected to slain children or people who died that were kind of official recognitions of loss. And we've stopped doing that. I mean, we do it unofficially. So I mean, if you go around the city of Oxford, I live, you'll see ghost bikes as they're sometimes called white bicycles, which mark places in which cyclists have been killed, families will often laugh, flowers, but we don't mark that. But that's an informal thing. And I think one of the things I'd like the notion of an inquiry to do is to publicly acknowledge the violence that has taken place and recognise it as such. And I think that's one of the ways in which we've kind of normalised road death is that we don't mark, we don't do that public recognition. And the second aspect of that would be that kind of preventative inquiry, where if you gather all the relevant actors together, the question they should ask is, why did this happen? What was it about this environment that enabled this death to occur? And how can we alter this environment to try and stop it happening in the future? And that should be the organizing question. There's one more. Yes, I realise we've got dangerous actants as the fierce. Okay, so at the moment, as I said earlier on, I think the question is, if someone drives badly or recklessly, commits a criminal offence, no, what should then happen? At the moment, we think of it in criminal justice terms, we have all kinds of standard criminal justice ways of responding to it fines, prism and so on and so forth. And there's a worry that that's all a bit lenient for reasons I described, that sentences and jurors kind of don't really see the criminality. And the question of disqualification is kind of if any is sort of tagged on the end. I think we should flip that around. And if sentences are struggling to deal with the criminality, free them of having to do that and get them to ask a different question, which is, how can we do safety work? How can we respond to this incident in ways that prevents future risk? And my sense is, you need to work on both sides of the hybrid actants, the driver and the vehicle. So on the driver side, my claim is this, that we should make license suspension and revocation a much more central tool of road safety than we currently do. At the moment, we do it reluctantly, we do it. There's all these, as you'll know, exceptional harbship provisions. People, sentences are very reluctant to remove people's licenses from them. Whereas my sense is that we should make that much more central, we should do it more earlier for shorter periods of time for what are deemed less serious offenses. And in more serious cases, where no, people have been killed or seriously injured, I think we should seriously ask the question whether that person is fit to drive a car ever again. So that's the claim on the driver side. On the kind of object side, I think there's all kinds of things that we can, that we might do to control the risk generated by that object, such as putting in black boxes to someone's vehicle, requiring them to fit intelligent speed assistance systems. So that, so that what you're asking sentences to do is faced with, no, for example, a reckless driver who is injured or killed someone is do the safety work first. Having done that, if you then still decide that some quotient of punishment is required, then, then turn to the punishment question. But do that second. And the moment we don't do that, we do the punishment. And the future safety work is the very least secondary, sometimes entirely absent. I think you've got quite a job on your hands to persuade the public and probably policymakers, politicians as well, that reducing car dominance would be an act of liberation rather than oppression. Is that a task that you're equal to though? It's something that you're ready to take that on. I have no idea. I mean, I think one of the, I mean, there's a kind of, there's a kind of academic version of this and a policy version of this and then they overlap partly. I think one of the things I want to do in this project is have a serious go at just trying to describe the various ways in which motor car-centric mobility systems are harmful. They're harmful in terms of injury and death. They're harmful to the air that we breathe, the noise of the environment. They're harmful to, they generate biodiversity loss. They're harmful to non-human animals in all kinds of ways. They are, they have all sorts of implications for the kind of carbon emissions. So I think I, I want to do a kind of a thorough job of actually trying to just describe and understand those effects. I'm not the first person to have done that. There's lots of people working in public health, for example, who've known this for a long time. And as a way of just trying to unsettle that, that extremely positive association that our culture makes between driving and freedom and convenience and status and so on and so forth. And that might also involve asking different kinds of questions about what we mean by freedom in this sense. And we should be, I mean, yeah, there is a kind of very kind of positive celebratory discourse about driving in our society, but there's all sorts of people who drive, but don't really like it or feel a drive because they kind of have to because they live in places where there's not very many alternatives who find it a bit of drudgery who spend their hours of their day stuck in commuter traffic, who if you organize their environment differently, you might find alternative and more well-being generating ways of, of getting around. And that's the kind of policy version of this, is that I think we just need to move to a world where we, where we just generate better and more accessible alternatives. So the people are exercising genuine freedom. Genuine freedom is the capacity to choose between meaningful alternatives. If people are driving because that's the only way they can get around, that's not the exercise of freedom, that's dependency. We could go on, we've got so many questions that I'd love to ask, but I think we'll have to say them for another time, but there is one more question I'd like to put to you, Professor, if I may. I'm here on behalf of Project Edward, which stands for everyday without a road death. Do you think your research gives you hope or does it suggest that a zero death target is unachievable without a fundamental transformation of how we move around and one that goes far beyond road safety as we currently practice it. I think both of those things can be true. So I think that target is achievable. One reason for thinking it's achievable is there are cities in the world that have achieved it. I mean, both Oslo and Helsinki and recent years have produced years in which there has been no death or serious injury and they've done it because they've taken seriously the question of of generating alternatives to road traffic and organising the environment kind of in the way that I've just been describing that you basically you treat cars in our cities as guests and if you get if you're a guest in someone else's house you behave accordingly and you know you slow traffic down you create places in which cars can go and not go you create an environment when first and foremost you are thinking about the the safety and the enjoyment of people who either live in that environment or trying to walk or cycle around it. So that's so it's not impossible. There are cities in the world that have done it but it probably does involve a significant re-evaluation of how we think about the place of the car in our lives and our cities and how we get around and the generation of world in which we spend much more time and effort and money generating alternatives and creating systems in which those alternatives can work and maybe kind of thinking differently about the right relationship between mobility and freedom. Professor Ian Loeder, thank you so much for hosting me here in this beautiful study overlooking a wonderful quad at All Souls College Oxford and for sharing your thoughts on on your role in the safe system. It's been an absolute pleasure and I'd be happy to come back.