The Effect of Pilotage on Navigational Accidents: Time Series Analysis of Cointegration for the İstanbul Strait

The İstanbul Strait, which plays an important role in maritime transportation in Türkiye and worldwide, is one of the busiest waterways with its dense traffic, handling approximately 3.5%–4.0% of global seaborne trade volume. Because of this dense ship and cargo traffic, it is of great importance to prevent accidents that may occur in the Strait. Most accidents occur when the pilotage service is not used. In this study, the aim is to determine how effective passage with a pilot in the İstanbul Strait is in reducing accidents by analyzing the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration method. Therefore, data on the number of accidents and the number of ships receiving pilotage services in the İstanbul Strait between 1996 and 2023 are analyzed, and the statistical relationship between them is investigated. This study found a significant long-term relationship between pilotage services and the number of accidents. It is concluded that the pilotage service has a negative effect on the number of accidents: a one-unit increase in the number of passages with a pilot is associated with a −0.0036 decrease in the number of accidents.