Evaluation of traffic accidents in İstanbul Kadıköy C region in details in a geographic information system

The need for traveling, which is a must in our daily life, is directly connected with the systems of transportation. Together with social, economic and technological developments, alternative transportation systems were put into use to satisfy people?s desire to have more comfortable and economic transportation with decreased travel times. Although transportation sector offers pretty much alternatives to our citizens, highway transportation mode is heavily preferred to railways, maritime lines and airways, which are comparatively safer and more efficient. Currently, the share of highway mode is 95% in passenger and 90% in freight transportation in our country. The statistics show that traffic accident measures in Turkey are high with respect to the world statistics. There are several main reasons behind this figure such as the imbalanced transportation share among modes, insufficient road capacities and improper driver behavior. In this study, traffic accidents occurred within the border of city of Istanbul, which has 15 percent of population of Turkey and 23,8 percent of the vehicles registered In Turkey, were analyzed, and traffic accidents in the European Side of Istanbul have been evaluated in details in a Geographical Information System (GIS) developed. Having evaluated the accidents occurred in Istanbul, traffic accidents in the Anatolian Side (called region C) have been examined with the help of graphics established for different years (2003, 2004 and 2005) in terms of accident location, weather and the number of vehicles involved in the accidents. The accidents happened on D-100 highway, Sahil Road, Bagdat Street, Minibus road and on some arterials in Kadıköy County of region C were also examined by transferring the associated data to the GIS. For this examination, traffic accidents data (the number of accidents, death people, injured people, etc.) on these roads were entered to the system and quarried to obtain some useful information about the accidents such as the number of traffic accidents per km, by gender, by roads, by plates, etc. As a result, we evaluated 51.343 vehicles involved in 25.098 accidents in 2003, 103.213 vehicles involved in 52.576 accidents in 2004, and 73.383 vehicles involved in 37.383 accidents in the first 8 months of 2005. We determined the distribution of traffic accidents in region C by roads and the areas with high risk. Keywords; Geographic Information System, Traffic Accidents, Istanbul, Kadıköy C Region, Database