The effect of traffic patterns and COVID-19 on accident hotspots in Turkey

Abstract

This study was conducted to determine the impact of the Covid-19 on road traffic accidents across Turkey’s primary roads from 2015 to 2022. The accidents were analyzed within a space–time cube, characterized by spatial bins of 5 and 10 kilometers and temporal steps of 1 and 3 months using Emerging Hot Spot Analysis. The temporal behavior of the data was evaluated using the Mann–Kendall and Sen’s slope methods, while stationarity using the Augmented Dickey–Fuller. On national scale, there was a significant decrease in accidents by 27.19% from 2019 to 2020, in injuries by 29.68%, and in deaths by 14.39%.