ABOUT ME | PERSONAL | MEMOIR | PUBLIC TRANSPORT
The Metro Got Closer to My Home!
It will probably never reach my isolated neighborhood, but coming almost halfway from the port of Piraeus still helps
On 10 October 2022 no less than three brand new Metro stations got the inaugurating champagne bottle in Athens. All three are in the wider area I live, and one of them is within a walking distance.
Well, kind of. It is ~2.5 km / 1.5 miles away. It feels closer though. The two ‘old’ Metro stations of my header image are the ones I’ve been using whenever I want to go toward the center of Athens. Before those two opened a couple of years ago I had to go via the port of Piraeus and get its old (non-Metro) electric train that runs like a turtle on wheels.
Apart from being slow, going from Amfiali -my neighborhood- to Piraeus meant a lot of traffic during the rush hours in particular, while packed like sardines in buses -even with Covid- whenever a bus driver did not bother to come at all, and super expensive double taxi fares late at night whenever I lost the last bus or did not even arrive.
After those two ‘old’ Metro stations opened I could bypass Piraeus but there was still the problem of how to go from Amfiali to them. Metro is the only reliable public transport in Greece. Everything else is untrustworthy. There is a ‘telematics’ option to check out bus schedules online but unlike the Metro’s it is unreliable.
Everything else is so deplorable -except the tram, I love the tram; the Athenian tram is the Zen Buddhism jewel of Greek public transport, but it only has a seaside route- that Metro in comparison stands out as a transport paragon bit too much.
When the Metro first opened people thought that the usual ‘neo-Greek’ mentality would defile it as well. But it never did. It always remained fast, clean and reliable. That’s because the Athenian Metro is the product of a partnership between the state and private companies. All other public transport is 100% state-owned, with fully secure public employees.
I am not advocating making everything private. That did not work at all when it was tested with the first wave of private energy companies. One company owner declared ‘bankruptcy’ from... Argentina, after fleeing with millions of Euros of taxes and money from pre-paid bills. But I think certain segments, particularly public transport, should not be fully state-owned; neither should unfireable employees exist.
Anyway, enough with that, let’s explain how I’ll move to Athens from today. I will skip both ‘old’ Metro stations and take the one at the center of the image, which is marked as ‘Closer!’ to me. If, for instance, I return late at night from a munch ( ← 🔞) or play party at the center of Athens I can more easily walk from there to home than from one of the other three Metro stations.
The one Metro station at the bottom that is also marked as ‘New!’ is peculiar in that it is both new and old. More precisely, the ‘New’ was built under the old (the turtle on wheels). The Metro station was built right outside the quaint pre-WW2 station of the turtle on wheels. This is the 2nd of the three new Metro stations.
The final one is at ‘Dimotiko Theatro,’ at the center of Piraeus. That one is for when you want to go to Piraeus -not in the main port, in Passalimani, Marina Zeas, etc- for coffee, dinner, or shopping instead of the center of Athens or the other municipalities. That station is the new terminal station of Athens’ Metro Line 3 from today, from the Piraeus’ side.
Just like I predicted, the Metro is probably going to reach Amfiali -or, even more west, Perama- in… 30+ years, perhaps with a future Line 5. And that might never happen unless the isle of Salamis is linked to Perama with a bridge or tunnel. A 4th Metro line -by the way, Line 1 is not a Metro, it’s the turtle- started being developed, but that one will service the wider center of Athens and its most densely populated areas.
The silver lining of the Metro not getting much closer to my neighborhood is that the rent prices are not going to go through the roof like they did wherever a new Metro station opened. “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” right? ☺️
An About Me article by Nikolaos Skordilis. This is a memoir piece about me and my beloved dog:
I recommend this memoir piece as well. Brian Lageose is very funny:
