Can you make a smart city from historical cities?
Athens on the road to smartness.
Athens may not be the smartest city in Greece by its own admission, but that’s not to say that situation won’t change any time soon. The University of West Attica’s Panagiotis Papantoniou tells Intertraffic about some of the projects that are helping to move Athens up the smart city table.
Intertraffic: Someone once said that the way you can work out if a city is smart or not is if you poke that city, it reacts. So if you asked the city a question, it would answer it. Is Athens a smart city? If you poked Athens, would it react?
Panagiotis Papantoniou (PP): I think the answer to that is that Athens is not yet a smart city. There are some steps that have been taken over the last few years but they're very slow steps. First and foremost many of the smart city plans were severely delayed because of the 2008-2013 economic crisis. During this timeframe, pretty much nothing happened in general in Greece, and even the traffic management centre of Athens was not working. Now, what has been happening over the last three or four years is first, there is now a new traffic management centre in Athens, which is under the auspices of the region of Attica. The centre belongs to the region of Attica, but mainly deals with the city of Athens and some surrounding smaller cities. The goal is to manage the traffic in a smarter fashion.
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First and foremost many of the smart city plans were severely delayed because of the 2008-2013 economic crisis
Intertraffic: What methods and practices are being implemented and deployed?
PP: So far they have put in some smart traffic signs, some smart pedestrian crossings that are established and there are many variable message signs. Also the public transport operators have a mobile application where you can book your tickets online, and almost every bus stop in Athens is a smart bus stop that tells you how many minutes you have to wait until the next bus arrives. In terms of public transport, things are definitely improving but in terms of traffic there are projects and solutions that are still mainly at the pilot stages. This is the main issue but we now have a funding tool called TRIESIS that supports municipalities in their quest to make smarter tech decisions and provide funding for the construction and management of the municipalities’ traffic programs. We have a separate section for Smart Cities that started in 2021: they put forward proposals and we try to implement them.
In terms of public transport, things are definitely improving but in terms of traffic there are projects and solutions that are still mainly at the pilot stages
