4 This distinction between anthropological space and the geometrical space of grids and
networks is taken from Merleau-Ponty (Conley 2001).
5 In any case, to take the UK as an example, journeys on foot now account for only
between a quarter and a third of all journeys, and are still declining as a proportion of
all journeys. However, this proportion is higher in inner urban areas (Hillman 2001).
6 From the vast scriptural apparatus of the travel industry to the evolution of videos on
power walking (Morris 1998).
7 I make no value judgements about automobility here because these judgements seem
to me to have too often stood in the way of an understanding of the attractions of the
phenomenon. This is certainly not to say, however, that I am some kind of fan of
automobility, and for all the usual reasons (see Rajan 1996).
8 There may, of course, be a simple, if rather glib, explanation for this elision: in 196 7 ,
driving with his parents from his brother’s house to a restaurant, de Certeau was involved
in a serious automobile collision in which his mother was killed and he lost the sight of
one eye. Miraculously his father, the driver, was hardly injured at all. Apparently,
according to Dosse (2002), the accident caused de Certeau considerable guilt because
he felt he had been responsible for the delay which caused his father to drive so fast.
I am indebted to Tom Conley for this information. As Stuart Elden has noted in a
personal communication, this lack of the presence of the automobile is in marked
contrast to a writer like Henri Lefebvre, who mentions cars at various points in his
works. Lefebvre was, of course, a cab driver for two years of his life.
9 Some other traversiste authors like Paul Virilio and, latterly, Marc Auge do tackle the
automobile but in a high-handed and, more often than not, hyperbolic tone which
I want to get away from.
10 These techniques of wholesale landscape design have existed since at least the 1930s.
The work of Merriman (2001) shows how important they were in, for example, the
construction of the British motorway system. I am indebted to Geof Bowker for
pointing me to viewshed analysis.
11 I am indebted to Michael Curry for this information.
12 This statistic includes a good number of homes in trailer parks and custom-designed
‘estates’ that are only nominally mobile, it should be added. Some of these homes now
have to comply with local building codes but, even so, even the most immobile mobile
homes are still sold, financed, regulated and taxed as vehicles.
13 Thus, there is a whole ‘manipulatory area’, as Mead put it, of sensing objects which
cannot be understood as just the incarnation of symbolic systems but relies on various
kinaesthetic dispositions held in the bodily memory. In turn, we can speak of objects
pushing back.
14 As Katz (2000: 4 6) rightly points out, the location of this hybrid is not exactly locatable:
‘The driver operates from a moving point in a terrain for interaction, and that terrain
is defined in part by the driver’s current style of driving’.
15 Drivers often seem to assume that other forms of road user embodiment (e.g. cyclists)
should conform to the same rules of the road as they do and become irate when such
users follow what seem to be, in some sense, unfair tactics.
16 Thus, by one account, automobile electronics now account for more than 80 per cent
of all innovation in automobile technology. On average, modern cars now have some
four kilometres of wiring in total. In some higher-end vehicles, electronics components
account for 20 to 23 per cent of total manufacturing cost. By 2005, by one estimate,
higher-end vehicles will require an average power supply of 2.5 KW and consequently
there are moves towards 36 volt batteries and 4 2 volt systems (Leen and Heffernan
2002).
17 Such a viewpoint is, of course, congruent with many intellectual developments of late,
such as actor-network theory and other developments originating from the sociology
of science (cf. Schatzki 2002), and is taken to its farthest extreme by Rouse (1996: 1 4 9)
who denotes ‘practice’ in such a way that it can embrace the actions of both humans
262 Notes