Ermoupoli: policing is decongesting the centre

The daily, organised presence of police officers in the centre of Ermoupoli has noticeably changed the city’s traffic picture, according to an account by the local outlet Cyclades24. For about a month and a half, traffic officers, trainees and officers on duty — together with the command — have been on the streets during the morning and afternoon peak hours. In the afternoons, officers are stationed at about five key points in the Axos area, while a motorcycle unit patrols continuously and removes illegally parked vehicles. The measure that best captures the difference is time: getting through to the provincial road network used to take up to an hour and is now completed in about twenty minutes. The presence is not confined to directing traffic: it also includes issuing parking fines, which is the main cause of the delays in the city centre.

The cause of the congestion is structural and relates to the shape of the town. On narrow streets with a single lane in each direction, one illegally parked vehicle is enough to create a queue of dozens of cars behind it. The phenomenon intensifies in the summer months, when the traffic of permanent residents is joined by visitors’ rental vehicles and by ferry arrivals, which unload hundreds of cars in a short space of time. Ermoupoli functions at once as the administrative centre of the Cyclades and as a transit port, with the result that its traffic does not follow the rhythm of a purely tourist destination.

Beyond traffic, an improvement in driver behaviour is also recorded. In a count carried out by the same outlet between 12:00 and 13:15, among some seven hundred motorcycles only four riders were found without a helmet — an indicative sample, which is not a statistic for the whole. At the same time, improved behaviour at pedestrian crossings is noted, mainly from vehicles with local number plates. Night-time checks for driving under the influence of alcohol are carried out systematically both within Ermoupoli and on the provincial network. The account covers a short time window on a single day and is not a substitute for the official offence figures kept by the traffic police.

The account itself, however, notes that policing does not solve the problem but manages it. Parking, loading and unloading in the commercial centre and the handling of ferry arrivals remain issues that require permanent measures — parking spaces, set delivery hours and planning to decongest the waterfront. Without those, the improvement remains a function of staff presence, which is reinforced during the summer months and shrinks out of season. More from Syros in the Syros section. Another open question is whether the measure will continue after the end of the season, when the extra staff are withdrawn and the service returns to its permanent strength.