Banning cars from the lower part of Syntagma Square would make crossing to Ermou Street a leisurely stroll rather than the mad dash that it is today. [Intime News]
A bold yet simple proposal for radically improving the quality of life in downtown Athens has been on Athens Mayor Haris Doukas’ desk for the past few days, awaiting his perusal. What it suggests, in short, is to partially rid central Syntagma Square from the bane of traffic.
As anyone who has visited the public square in front of Parliament knows, pedestrians and commuters arriving at Syntagma on the metro and wishing to cross the street toward Monastiraki and Plaka need to wait at the traffic light and make a mad dash within a few seconds before the traffic starts again. Is there a better way?
Dimitris Kontargyris, an experienced architect who has been working on an idea for a better way for around a decade, believes that there is.
“The renovation that was carried out on the Ermou Street side of Syntagma Square three years ago certainly spruced the area up a bit, but the ‘big picture,’ the overall appearance of the square, will remain the same as long as this attractive stretch continues being inundated by the noisy passage of thousands of vehicles every day,” he tells Kathimerini.
Right now, all vehicles traveling from Stadiou Street and Vasilissis Sofias Avenue toward Hadrian’s Arch and the Temple of Olympian Zeus at the entrance to Plaka need to follow the same route along the bottom of Syntagma Square to get onto Filellinon Street and Amalias Avenue.
The proposal being put forward to the mayor suggests rerouting private traffic through Othonos and Vasileos Georgiou A streets so that the bottom part of Syntagma is used only for public transportation.
This means turning Georgiou A and Othonos into two-way streets and channeling traffic from Amalias onto Othonos.
“These interventions would relieve the lower part of Syntagma Square from traffic – with the exception of buses and trolley buses – and finally connect the Ermou pedestrianized street to the plaza in the middle of the square,” explains Kontargyris. “People haven’t realized what a change this would make.”
The initial proposal was drawn up with the contribution of the late and celebrated city planner Thanasis Aravantinos and has been vetted by civil engineer and transportation planner Nikolaos Voskoglou.
“The older proposal had also been submitted to the municipal authority at the time, but we never got a response back,” Voskoglou tells Kathimerini.
“For the record, we had also explored the possibility of making part of the street an underpass but the solution was rejected because it would create a problem with the drainage system and the metro, meaning that it would have to go too far underground to make sense,” he adds.
But what are the challenges of making such intervention in a densely packed city like Athens?
“The city’s municipal services do not have the staff to properly evaluate interventions of this scale,” says Voskoglou. “The result is that the ball is often tossed to academics, who tend, as theoreticians, to come up with all sorts of oddball ideas. In general, though, it’s not easy to take the plunge.”
Kontargyris notes that the proposal for making the lower part of Syntagma Square a car-free zone is part of a more ambitious plan for creating a pedestrian friendly route stretching 1.5 kilometers from Omonia Square to Zappeion Hall by eventually banning cars from Stadiou and Filellinon streets.
This proposal was submitted to City Hall in March.
However, “following the protracted upset in the city center from the Grand Walk, another upset on such a scale within such a short space of time will obviously not be tolerated by the residents of Athens,” adds Kontargyris, referring to the controversial pedestrian and bicycle route created by the previous municipal authority.
