Turkey plans to increase speed limits on highways

ANKARA

Authorities are considering increasing speed limits on Turkey’s highways, starting with newly built roads, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu has said.

Currently, the speed limit for passenger cars on highways is 120 kilometers per hour (km/h). It is 100 km/h for buses and 90 km/h for trucks.

“Authorities tolerate up to 132 km/h speed on highways, and we can increase the speed limit by 20 km/h for passenger cars,” Soylu said.

He added that officials from the General Directorate of Highways and the traffic department of the police force are presently conducting a study for a possible increase in the speed limit.

Soylu also said that 7,530 people were killed in road accidents in 2015, but the death toll declined to 4,866 in 2020.

The number of driving licenses issued grew more than 36 percent while the number of motor vehicles increased 49.6 percent, and despite those increases, road accidents and the death toll from the accidents dropped, he noted.

According to data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), some 984,000 traffic accidents occurred in Turkey in 2020, down from 1.2 million in the previous year.

The decline in road accidents last year is also related to travel bans, curfews and lockdowns imposed to bring the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic under control.

Around 226,000 people were injured in those road accidents versus 283,000 in 2019.