Interpreting mobility reform through care: Ambivalent authority in Taiwan

This article examines how human-centred mobility reform can reproduce, rather than displace, entrenched hierarchies of automobility. Focusing on Taiwan, it analyses a regulatory archive of national traffic legislation and Taipei municipal instruments through which recent safety reforms have been articulated in the language of care, participation, and protection for vulnerable road users. The article argues that these reforms do not simply replace vehicle-centred urban order with pedestrian-oriented governance. Instead, they overlay existing mobility hierarchies with increasingly dense classifications, conditional provisions, and delegated discretion. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence, the paper conceptualises this condition as ambivalent authority: a mode of postcolonial governance in which authority must appear protective and non-coercive while preserving inherited infrastructures of motorised priority. Through analysis of human-oriented road design, pedestrian-priority legislation, scooter and non-motorised classifications, and municipal mechanisms for temporary road use, the paper shows how care becomes a territorial technology of rule. Its contribution is threefold: it links postcolonial theory to urban mobility governance, clarifies how automobility persists through reform rather than only through resistance to reform, and reframes regulatory complexity as a political mechanism through which contradictory urban priorities are managed. The article concludes that mobility reform in Taiwan governs not by resolving the tension between care and hierarchy, but by continually recalibrating it.