Over the past century, the place of the automobile in the city has been challenged on a number of grounds, most notably those of citizens' rights, public safety, social justice and urban aesthetics. The most recent challenge to the automobile centred on the environmental impacts of different 'modal choices', in particular, the differential environmental effects of bus, bicycle, or automobile travel. This debate quickly reached a stalemate. While environmentalists drew on a variety of statistics to support the case for improvements in public transport services and cycling facilities, advocates of the automobile used other statistics to demonstrate that, given the right roads, traffic flows, speed limits, engines and fuels, cars could be environmentally-friendly 'green machines'. More than a decade on, the use of automobiles in Australian cities, indeed in many cities, continues unabated. The persistent increase in automobile usage is often explained by reference to technological progress, increases in personal wealth and the considered choices of free individuals (eg, Adams, 1980;Donovan, 1996). Alternatively, it has been explained in terms of the power of particular fractions of capital and the shaping of individual choices by capitalist interests and liberal ideologies of self-interest (eg, Franks, 1986;Hodge, 1990). The former explanation operates to naturalize contemporary practices of mobility while the latter tends to position motorists as victims of automotive companies and their technologies (Bonham, 2002: 19-24).This chapter locates the proliferation of automobile usage within a broader study of how urban populations have been incited to think about and conduct their journeys. The approach I have taken draws on the insights of Michel Foucault's genealogical studies (Foucault, 1977; as it examines the micro techniques by which bodies have been disciplined to the use of 'public' space and the practice of travel. Discipline, to paraphrase Foucault, '. . . centres on the body as a machine, optimizing its capabilities, increasing its usefulness and docility, integrating it into systems of efficient and economic controls' (Foucault, 1978: 139). The body of the traveller -motorist, pedestrian, child -is not a 'natural' body but a body worked upon through relations of power and knowledge to conduct the journey in particular ways. It is argued in this chapter that