Road Safety 2.0: A Case of Transforming Government's Approach to Road Safety by Engaging Citizens Through Web 2.0

The aim of this case study is first, to determine the extent to which web 2.0 can be the technology that would enable a strong relationship between government and its citizens to develop in managing road safety and second, to examine the endeavours of the WA Office of Road Safety (ORS) in fostering the relationship. It shows that in ORS' road safety strategy for 2008-2020, community engagement is strongly advocated for the successful development and execution of its road safety plan but the potential of web 2.0 approaches in achieving it is not recognised. This would involve the use of blogs and RSS as suitable push strategies to get road safety information to the public. Online civic engagement would harness collective intelligence ('the wisdom of crowds') and, by enabling the public to annotate information on wikis, layers of value could be added so that the public become co-developers of road safety strategy and policy. The case identifies three major challenges confronting the ORS to become Road Safety 2.0 ready: how to gain the publics' attention in competition with other government agencies, how to respond internally to online citizen engagement, and how to manage governmental politics.