Examining the Impact on Road Safety Performance of Socioeconomic Variables in Turkey

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that each year, 1.35 million people worldwide die in traffic accidents, 20 to 50 million people are injured, and many of those who are injured are disabled. This article uses time-series data for the period 1970 to 2018 in Turkey short- and long-term social economic variables between the number of road accidents, energy consumption, gross domestic product per capita, vehicle kilometers traveled, number of motor vehicles, divided road length, and population growth to investigate the causal relationship. In the analysis, the vector error correction model (VECM) and the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model were used for the short and long term, respectively. The results show that a 1% increase in the number of motor vehicles increases the number of accidents by 2.83% in the long term and has a positive relationship with traffic accidents. It has been determined that a 1% increase in the population increases the number of accidents by 9.43% in the short term and has a positive relationship with traffic accidents. It has been observed that a 1% increase in the length of the divided highway (LNDR [-2]) reduces accidents by 1.21% in the short term and there is a negative relationship between energy consumption and divided roads. This result supports the decision of the administrators in the country to construct a divided road.