The Hindu Business Line : Greece — a noisy democracy makes silent progress

One of my strongest memories of Athens, during the last Olympic Games, in August 2004, is the smell of bitter orange and olive trees — both of which arecommon in streets of Athens. Last week, I was back in Syntagma Square of Greece's capital for Christmas. While an antique carousel kept both adults and children going in circles, the stench of decaying rubbish grew stronger on the streets of Athens.

At the time of writing this, the rubbish had not been collected, for almost a week. Did you know the first municipal dump was established in ancient Athens in 400 B.C.? Yes, on Christmas day 2006, Athens reeked of landfill as massive piles of rubbish rotted on the capital's streets!

Waste Management

While garbage and graffiti are two of the best `barometers' to read the mind of society, waste processing is nothing new for Greeks. Over the past 30 years, the Greek economy has been one of the fastest growing within the European Union. Apart from supply, demand also reflects the new unsustainable consumption patterns. The amount of rubbish produced per person has increased 50 per cent to 500 kg per year since 2000 with packaging waste — from food and consumer items — adding to household garbage. Most of the household rubbish ends up in any one of the 1,200 legal and illegal landfills that can be found across Greece.

Waste management is one of Athens's biggest problems as the government has failed to effectively implement recycling programmes that can adequately absorb a large portion of household trash. Plastic items amount to 20 per cent of residential waste while the figure in Germany stands at 2 per cent.

The EU landfill directive places quantitative targets to reduce the filling with biodegradable municipal solid waste. Member-states must reduce the total amount to 35 per cent of the waste produced in 1995, until 2016. Greece is a country that relies heavily on landfill — up to 80 per cent and took a four-year extension to attain the target by 2020.

Moody's Rating

While waste management in Athens seems a Herculean task, they have made enormous technological progress in other civic areas.

The upgrading of the City of Athens' credit rating, from A2 to A1, brings it on a par with Greece's sovereign rating. The new rating enables the municipality to secure more favourable conditions to cover its funding requirements for new investments via the international market.

Restricted Traffic Zones

Special measures introduced way back in 1980 and still enforced and practiced in Athens is that in view of high smog levels, entry into the inner restricted zone is regulated by the number plates of private cars and taxis; number plates ending in odd and even numbers enter the zone on alternate days.

Athens Traffic Management

Athens has put in place some state-of-the-art infrastructure. The most important of these is the traffic management system.

The system is operates from two control centres to allow for the event of one control centre failing. It is fed with data from a variety of sources including close-circuit television cameras, traffic signals, video-detection cameras, ground loop detectors, speed radar devices and security personnel and traffic police on the ground.

In this way Athens' famous grid-locks have been avoided and are now a nightmare of the distant past.

Floating Car Data technology

Athens city Floating Car Data (FCD) technology allows official vehicles such as police cars or emergency services to act as sensors to allow the continuous, real-time recording of a current traffic situation and to form the core of traffic data acquisition.

RFID Parking Technology

Athens is the third European capital after London and Amsterdam to implement innovative parking solutions. The core of the Athens city parking system is a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) transponder card, which prevents any form of permit fraud.

Traditional paper permits, with a hologram or barcode sticker, have been replaced with the transponder card, which sits behind the car windscreen. This e-permit management system allows Greeks to apply for any type of permit online over the Internet. Existing permit holders can change or renew their permits themselves via their own personal web pages, or they can submit a request for a termination and refund.

The financial advantages and benefits of electronic parking management solutions have been seen in France, Spain and the Netherlands, where the system has been in operation for several years.

All of this technology is available on the basis of a service level agreement (SLA) without any significant upfront investments and Greece has taken full advantage of the facility. Good lesson for several Indian cities where parking is almost free in prime areas and city authorities lose enormous revenues.

With the on-street parking system, motorists pay for the exact time they are parked, to the minute rather than the hour, removing the frustration of overpaying to avoid parking fines and needing the exact change for the machine.

Attiki Odos Motorway

This high-speed toll motorway consists of two main motorways: the Elefsina Stavros Spata A/P Motorway (52.4km) and the Imittos Western Peripheral Motorway (12.9km). It offers three traffic lanes in both directions, one emergency lane, 32 multi-level interchanges and hundreds of over- and under-passes. Staffed with specially trained emergency units, it uses the most modern equipment for incident detection.

Toll Payment Methods

An Integrated Toll and Traffic Management System (ITTMS) allows the use of smart cards which are pre-paid, as a vrhicle pass through toll stations, a corresponding amount is electronically deducted. On the taxi ride to Athens airport, I experienced the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system, which involves a transponder (e-Pass) placed on the windscreen of the vehicle transmitting an identification signal to the antenna at the toll stations that charges the toll amount automatically.

Glittering Greece

As I sat down to have a quiet Greek Christmas dinner in the old part of Athens, I noticed that everything was loud — the music and the conversation around the table. Even the sound of glasses clinking and the clatter of knives and forks were loud.

I find the Greeks' tolerance for noise as something striking. I associate it with the sense of freedom.

Like Indians, the Greeks enjoy honking the horn or shouting from the balcony and having television and the radio on at the same time. Silently but conclusively, this noisy European democracy is making progress.

(The author is former Europe Director, CII, and lives in Cologne, Germany. Feedback may be sent to mohan.murti@t-online.de)

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