Setting quantified road safety targets : Theory and practice in Sweden

• Aim: The Swedish Government has a long tradition of setting quantified time-bounded road safety targets. Thisarticle identifies and analyses these targets, and evaluates the national road safety targets adopted in 1989, 1996 and1998 in order to assess whether the different targets fulfil the SMART criteria of being specific, measurable, achievable,realistic and time bounded.Methods: This study is a retrospective case study and in order to trace all relevant policy documents that containinformation on quantified targets, a snowball technique was applied. The searching process result in a total of 23 keydocuments and these were analyzed in two steps. The first step examined how the targets have been formulated andthe second step assessed whether the targets had been constructed according to the SMART criteria.Results: This study shows that, although all the specified targets were theoretically achievable, those targetsadopted in 1996 and 1998 were, according to this evaluation, unrealistic.Conclusion: This study raises the question as to the rationality of political leaders when adopting targets whichcould be difficult to achieve in reality. One explanation for their adoption is that unrealistic targets could serve as amanagement tool in that they could be rational from a road safety point of view because they could inspire stakeholdersto do more than they would otherwise have done. In this article, other motives behind the setting of unrealistic targetsare also discussed.

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)