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