Praise for pay parking
A pay parking scheme, introduced to central Athens last November in a bid to tackle chronic congestion, has had the intended effect as fewer cars are entering the city center and those that do are parking for shorter periods of time or using private car parks, municipal authority officials said yesterday. The system, which allows motorists to park in color-coded spaces after paying a fee deducted from a scratch card, has been embraced by thousands of motorists, according to Athens’s Deputy Mayor Chronis Akritidis. «We have improved the system, upgrading the quality of the cards and ensuring they are more widely available,» Akritidis said, adding that an average of 11,000 such cards are sold per day. Owners and workers of stores in the city center say the measure has made their life a lot easier and believe it should be extended to other congested districts such as Ambelokipi. The system has also facilitated the passage of buses on the capital’s roads, according to the Athens Urban Transport Organization (OASA). Government plans to build eight new car parks over the next five years – four within the Athens municipality and four alongside new stations on the metro extension – are expected to create 3,300 extra spaces. But transport experts say that the capital’s congestion problem cannot be solved without a long-term plan. They say the number of cars in Athens is increasing by 120,000 per year. As a result, more than a third (37 percent) of motorists need up to 40 minutes to find a parking place in central Athens, according to a recent study by the Athens University of Economics and Business. «A dynamic policy of creating parking spaces outside Athens’s traffic restriction ring could give the city some breathing space,» said Evangelos Matsoukis, president of the Greek Road Federation. Other transport experts believe the government has got its priorities wrong. «It’s amazing that billions of euros have been spent on major infrastructure projects such as the Attiki Odos, the metro extension and the tram but there has been no legislative framework drafted to solve our traffic problem,» the president of the Hellenic Institute of Transportation Engineers, Panos Papadakos, told Kathimerini.
