COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REGIONAL CRASH DATA IN TURKEY

Abstract

This study provides a comparative analysis of traffic safety in Turkey across the seven geographic regions over a 11 year time frame (2006 to 2016). The comparisons are performed in relative terms and absolute terms. Fatal and/or injury (FI) crashes per million population and per million registered vehicles were used to quantify safety. For the ordinal analysis, rates for the regions were ranked individually for each year as well as for the 11 years aggregated. An examination of the results indicated that the relative ranks of the regions were stable over the study period. Depending on the safety measure used, the relative rankings of regions varied. It means that a region ranked at the top (high crash rate) for one safety measure does not need to be ranked again at the top for other safety measure. For the cardinal analysis, the computed rates were used. These results were consistent with those from the ordinal analysis, but showed greater variability in the rates over time, which means that FI crash rates significantly increased over the time. A Geographic Information Systems based thematic maps were used to support these efforts.