Determining the relationship between the causes and the results of tramway accidents with multi criteria decision making techniques: A metropolitan municipality application

Urban rail systems have superior aspects such as being safer, punctual, comfortable, environmentally friendly and noiseless compared to traditional public transportation vehicles. Urban rail systems are more and more preferred in our country as in developing countries. However, although there are many studies analyzing the relationship between the causes and consequences of road vehicles, such studies are not encountered for urban rail system traffic accidents. There are almost no studies in which rail system traffic accidents are analyzed with multi-criteria decision making methods. Therefore, within the scope of this thesis, trams, which are one of the urban rail systems, were taken into consideration and the criteria that caused tram accidents were determined and the effects of these criteria on the accident results were examined with AHP and TOPSIS methods. Within the scope of the study, seven main criteria and 38 sub-criteria were determined: tram driver defects, tram defects, defects of other vehicles, passenger defects, pedestrian defects, road defects and environmental defects. Accident results are divided into three as fatal accident, injury accident and material damage accident. With the AHP method, criteria and options were weighted and it was seen that the most important criterion was the defects of other vehicles and the option with the highest weight was material damage accidents. When the options were sorted by TOPSIS method, the same ranking was obtained with the AHP method, and it was determined that the first place was material damage accidents, the second was injury accidents and the third was fatal accidents.