The commuter’s lament

Trains overflowing with the city’s denizens and tourists. Buses clanking along as they shift from first to second gear or idling on streets bottle-necked by a crash up ahead, a protest rally, fans of a sports event, roadworks – there’s always something. Traffic jams stretching for kilometers are back. 

The state of Athens’ streets will never become acceptable even though it is inevitable in a city with infrastructure built for one million cars and now hosting some 3.2 million. That number is rising too; nothing can beat having your own private transportation mode. Public transportation is like a poorly tailored, overly tight suit in this city.

Any progress on this front is always incremental and is soon gobbled up by the increase in commuters and the increase in car numbers. In the civilized world, in the meantime, the exact opposite is happening: Residents are giving up their cars and measures like low-emission zones, pedestrian and bicycle networks, and small “green” cars for shared use are being introduced to create smart mobility networks.

Here in Athens, the public transportation is not even adequate, so there is no room for talk of tolls at the entrance to the city center or specific hours when the downtown area is car-free. Even bicycle lanes and pedestrian routes have proven elusive. In this densely populated and densely built metropolis, the car rules over the people like a dictator.

We the residents shout for more buses, more frequent train services and expanded routes, but we go completely silent when it comes to rampant violations. Accustomed to flouting the rules, we will drive our motorcycles on the sidewalk, park our cars on the side of major thoroughfares and drive in the bus lane, feeling smarter than the driver keeping to his or her part of the road. And there is absolutely no way we will entertain any solution to these problems that makes life harder for us, like ride-sharing, for example, which managed to get some 25,000 cars off the streets of Amsterdam.

There are a lot of very elementary things the state has an obligation to do, even though people’s noses may get bent out of shape. Society will never be ready to embrace changes that make life harder, even if it is for the short-term only.