1Driving and working on motorways

It is all too easy to treat the motorway as if it were a non-place; as if it were a featureless, empty culture-less route, the nowhere on the way to somewhere. To think about the motorway as the soul-less infrastructure which connects up global nodes of intense, rich activity. Is this not a little like noting that football pitches are terribly flat, highly geometric, pay little design heed to their surrounding landscape and impose their generic form on cultures from Norway to Mexico. Put the players on a football pitch and this strange way of looking at it disappears. Put the traffic back on a motorway and it comes to life as a particular place where social life happens. It is new but not all that new any longer, having been with us for half a century now (Merriman 2001). It can be found girding more and more territories, but in some places its growth is finally being checked like the railways that preceded it. And whether we wanted it or not, it has become a commonplace and an almost unavoidable part of transportation. What then if we approach the motorway as just one more place where social life happens, as growing number of analysts are doing (Juhlin 2001; Katz 1999; Merriman Forthcoming-a; Miller 2001)? What if we place it on a level with the pavement, the public park, the laboratory, the school and the house? Is it not then another geographically, historically, legally and technologically constructed setting for appropriate and inappropriate activities? At the motorway’s inception it was a strange place, with new codes of conduct, a place for projecting fears and fantasies (Merriman 2001; Merriman Forthcoming-b). As with all new technologies we have made it at home in our lives. It might be stretching the point to say that we have made a home on the motorway, but there are people who spend considerable parts of their lives driving along its parallel lanes (Katz 1999). In what follows I will be looking at a brief episode in day of the contemporary version of the travelling salesman (Spears 1995). the mobile office worker. This is an increasingly common type of company employee, a person who spends the majority out of their office in their car whilst travelling around a sales or service regio