Beyond technical fixes: vulnerable mobility and the affective governance of safety

Abstract

Road safety interventions are increasingly guided by systemic models such as Vision Zero and the Safe System paradigm. Yet the institutional coherence presumed by these frameworks often breaks down in postcolonial governance environments. This article develops an epistemology of vulnerable mobility to explain how safety is governed in Taiwan, where infrastructural danger persists despite continual legal amendments and behaviour-focused campaigns. Drawing on seventy-six Legislative Yuan Research Reports and twenty-five state and quasi-state safety education materials, the analysis shows that vulnerability is not only an outcome of risk exposure but a governing logic that legitimises affective, symbolic, and incremental interventions. Legal reforms exhibit a form of micro-historicity, signalling responsiveness without enabling structural redesign, whilst pedagogical infrastructures cultivate vigilance, caution, and personalised responsibility among vulnerable road users. Read through a mobilities lens, vulnerability is conceptualised not as a user attribute but as a governing condition through which movement is sensed, regulated, and normalised. This governance through affect emerges from Taiwan’s historically layered mobility regime, shaped by colonial spatial rationalisation, authoritarian legal legacies, and democratic improvisation. Beyond Taiwan, the article contributes to mobilities scholarship by showing how safety operates as the governance of feeling rather than the elimination of risk.