Driving and Drivering

Autonomous mobility does not invent distributed perception; it reorganises older relations among eye, body, vehicle and street into a predictive media infrastructure. Focussing on sensorised urban environments, this article theorises the post-ocular sensorium as a formation in which cameras, lidar, radar, V2X systems, digital twins and fleet memories convert the street into classifications, probabilities, alerts and trajectories. Through the cases of smart intersections, Chattanooga’s MLK Smart Corridor, autonomous-vehicle misclassification, routing anomalies and infrastructural error, the article examines how perception migrates from the driver’s eye to a lattice of vehicles, roadside instruments, municipal platforms and proprietary protocols. It argues that this migration produces not only new capacities for safety and anticipation, but also new forms of infrastructural illusion, in which model, map, message or feed slips out of register with the street it governs. The Chattanooga case is used to show that smart corridors are never merely technical prototypes: they inherit longer histories of urban planning, racialised displacement, pedestrian vulnerability and civic repair. The article therefore proposes Drivering as an ethics of acknowledgement for infrastructural seeing. Drivering names the civic discipline of making distributed road perception technically inspectable, publicly contestable, historically situated and ethically unfinished. Its conclusion is not a nostalgic recovery of human control, nor a refusal of machine perception, but a demand that networked sight remain answerable to the lives it classifies, anticipates and moves.