Doing Office Work on the

BY COMPARISON with the rivers we have sailed, or the forest pathswe have trodden for thousands of years1 the motorway is incipient,yet the curious place that is the multi-lane motorway no longer has quite the novelty value it once did. When it first appeared, like the railway before it, the motorway raised a new set of problems: how drivers ought to drive, what kind of vehicles would be allowed, the many things people could not do on such a road and whether it might be worthwhile at all (Merriman, 2001, 2004). Nowadays we are no longer struck with wonder that it might be possible for hundreds of individual vehicles to travel in close proximity at high speeds without constant fatalities and chaos ensuing. Instead, the motorway has now become one of our ordinary places, a space of conven-tion and an almost unavoidable part of our everyday mobility (Urry, 2004). In examining driving as a new form of everyday habitability, Nigel Thrift (2004) points out that, while making a hero of the walker in the city street, in terms of transport Michel de Certeau (1984) focused only on the carceral aspects of rail travel. The millions of automobiles already sharing city streets with pedestrians were dealt summarily with as alien invaders. Unwelcome new arrivals, cars were killing cities previously brought to life by creative pedestrian enunciations. While we might have sympathy with de Certeau’s lament for the drowning out of the poetry of footfalls on cobbles, ‘research on automobility shows the world of driving to be as rich and convo-luted as that of walking ’ (Thrift, 2004). Moreover, in turning our attention to the motorway we find a space where walkers, excepting repair crews, breakdowns and passengers inside coaches, are almost entirely absent. Even though we cannot walk there, we dwell upon the motorway in motion