ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how security has become a central topic for public transport in Sweden and how it can be understood in relation to people with disabilities who experience insecurity when traveling by bus or train. The chapter analyses public transport using Michel Foucault’s concept of dispositif de sécurité, namely how institutions and administrative arrangements maintain and enhance a certain form of control to reduce uncertainty among those who travel. This perspective is used to better understand today’s political goal that public transport should not only be accessible by being secure, but also by being usable for all. The chapter discusses the experiences of three individuals to show how uncertainty arises in everyday situations using public transport. It argues that there is a difference when it comes to security – on one side it is a feeling in people’s everyday lives, and on the other it is a predictable and transparent perspective in a specific system. In this way, security – in relation to accessibility – is framed by transport organisations as something that people with disabilities can expect when they use public transport. At the same time, the individual experiences often only fit into the rhetoric if they are transformed into the organisations’ way of looking at security, let alone as numbers in a diagram or as programme text.
