Se upp - allt fler kvinnor kör som män! Nollvisionen som diskurs och problemet män i trafiken

Abstract

Sweden is the first country in the world to have introduced the so-called Vision Zero (Nollvisionen). This is an ethical approach suggesting that road safety cannot be traded for mobility. Since the beginning of mass-motoring, men have been over-represented in traffic safety statistics, in terms of both “causing” accidents and casualties. Against the background of the Swedish Vision Zero, it is quite extraordinary how little attention work on traffic safety has paid to men’s over-representation in Swedish fatal road accidents (90%), and (auto)mobility as a way of doing gender. The present article discusses how men and women driver subjects are produced through the Vision Zero discourse, with a particular focus on how men in traffic are constructed. This is important since such constructions and modes of address affect possible interventions and “solutions” regarding road safety issues. Here I focus on three contemporary documents of policy making character or with general impact: first, the Governmental Act 2003 on road safety intervention; second, a report from the Swedish Road Administration which is applying a gender equality discourse on transport; and third a brochure issued by the Road Administration addressed to the everyday road user. These documents constitute case material that is illustrative of the Vision Zero as a generative apparatus of gender discourse. The article brings attention to the ambiguous ways in which the Vision Zero may, on the one hand, explicitly address men as problematic driver subjects, as an explicitly gendered high risk category; and, on the other, make men and masculine norms implicit through the rendering of young(er) driver subjects as problematic. This also involves pointing out women as an up and coming high risk category. To improve road safety, the discursive effects of this configuration suggest allocating responsibility partly to the “system”, partly to women driver subjects – in effect, to women who drive like men – rather than the men driver subjects.