Investigation of the traffic accident hotspots during the official national holiday periods

Every year in traffic accidents thousands of people lost their lives due to the increasing of the road safety problems day by day in our country just like as in the whole world. According to the Turkish Statistics Institute published the report in 2010; traffic accidents have increased during the festive holiday period which is stated that the number of accidents in daily traffic increases of up to 1.5 times. Hence, in order to determine the effects of the official holiday periods on the traffic accident numbers in our country and to determine the locations of the accident hotspots during these periods have been carried out in this thesis study of scope. In the thesis study, temporal and spatial statistical analysis were carried out on the traffic accidents data which obtained between 2005 and 2013 from the General Directorate of Highways (KGM) and approximately 300 thousand road traffic accidents were investigated. As a result of the temporal analysis, holiday periods with a statistically significant increase in the number of traffic accidents were determined and as regard to these places where traffic accidents were became dense were examined. Zones where dangerous areas are located by means of spatial analysis were determined and repetitive analysis were carried out in order to find traffic accidents in same locations between 2005 and 2013. As a result of the research, it was adjudged that there was a statistically significant increase in the number of traffic accidents and that there was a total of 75024 segments obtained by dividing state roads into one-kilometer segments and there were traffic accidents hotspots in a total of 156 segments in different offcial holiday periods by proposed method.