There are cars everywhere (parked & driving) in Athens, so walking and cycling around the city isn’t awesome. There are other positive things about the city to highlight (and even some great walking streets).
As cars are parked in every available curb side space, these parkettes offer a welcome reprieve.
The transit system is electric (busses, subways & trams).
There are free public toilets available.
Playgrounds & recreation facilities are privately & publicly funded.
I’m going to do a separate post on public art. To wrap this one up, here are a few more miscellaneous highlights.
Carbon conscious COVID dodging family travel 
Overall, do you think Athens is ahead of most NA cities in helping to reduce personal footprint?
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I’m not sure. Google tells me 3.2 million is the population of Athens. So bigger than Toronto. We took transit only once, it worked well for us. The cars are a problem though. They are parked absolutely everywhere, and sidewalks are narrow. Crossing the street is dangerous. My guess is no, other than cities with poor transit systems.
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Good call regarding size of city. I guess I was impressed by the electrification of their transit system and the solar hot water heating. However, personal internal combustion vehicles are likely the more dominant issue in city-wide and personal footprint. GO transit has plans to electrify the Lakeshore routes; but, you may have heard of that when you lived in TO!
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Good point on the solar hot water. And dryers are not a thing in Europe, so that is huge.
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Je suis française et j’habite Athènes depuis 40 ans, c’est une ville qui POURRAIT être super (climat, mer, soleil) mais qui malheureusement est très fatigante , surtout à cause des voitures qui sont considérées comme plus importantes que les êtres humains ! Aucun maire ne s’est attaqué à ce problème car le clientélisme et la corruption sont importants.
Seulement pendant le premier confinement la ville était super. Quel dommage ! Aucune loi n’est respectée en ce qui concerne la circulation des voitures.
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Merci pour votre point de vue, Béatrice. Je vois à quel point le confinement améliorerait les rues pour les habitants! Peut-être que les prix élevés de l’essence convaincront les gens d’éviter de conduire. Je ne pense pas non plus que les pilotes s’amusent beaucoup. Nous avons vu un conducteur endommager sa voiture en essayant de passer entre deux autres voitures. Il n’était pas content !
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Regarding carbon-conscious. I read an interesting article in the Economist, April 23, 2022 edition, titled, Habeas Carbon. The article discusses lawsuits that have been filed by groups against the government and corporations, that base grievance on the fact that targets/efforts for carbon reduction will not meet committed in the Paris accord (gov’t) or are not acting in the best interest of shareholders in reducing carbon output (corporations). Some lawsuits have been successful, unsuccessful, and are still in court. An interesting one of the latter, has been filed in the US with the plaintiff being ‘Future Generations filed Juliana v United states, alleging that the federal government has violated their constitutional rights to ‘life, liberty and property’ by allowing ‘dangerous levels’ of fossil fuel to be burnt. The plaintiffs are 21 citizens who are 19 years old and under. This case will be interesting, as the Paris accord is non-binding to the US.
If interested, let me know if you cannot access on-line somewhere, and I can scan you a copy – three page article.
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