Istanbul inundated daily with new autos

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Bumper to bumper traffic on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul is a daily occurrence with the number of registered vehicles increased by 25,377 in January. Hürriyet photo

Some 845 new vehicles were added to Istanbul’s traffic load everyday in January 2012. The number of registered vehicles in Istanbul increased by 25,337 in the first month of the year, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute’s (TÜİK) monthly report published yesterday.

The total number of registered land vehicles in Istanbul hit 2.95 million in January, while the figure was about 2.92 million December 2011, the data revealed.

The total number of vehicles registered in Turkey increased by 74.4 percent, nearly 126,000, in January 2012 compared with the previous month, according to TÜİK’s report.

Some 14,603 of land vehicles were deleted from registration books, bringing the total figure to 16.2 million in Turkey, according to the data.

Land vehicles are comprised of cars, small buses, buses, small trucks, trucks, motorcycles, tractors and special purpose vehicles.

Meanwhile Turkey ranked eighth in European auto sales in February and ninth in sales in the first two months of 2012, according to the data by the Automotive Distributors Association of Turkey. Turkish auto sales dropped by 27 percent in the first two months of 2012, compared to the same period last year. The European auto market shrank by 9.2 percent in February 2012 compared with the same month last year, and it has dropped

by 7.8 percent year-on-year in the first two months of 2012, data showed