
Up to 30,000 passengers took advantage of the expanded schedule on Athens Metro Lines 2 and 3 (red and blue lines) overnight Saturday, Urban Rail Network (STASY) CEO Thanassis Kottaras told ERTNews on Sunday.
Kottaras said that in the pilot program, the lines ran from 01:00 to 05:30 on Sunday, in an effort to see how a 24-hour system would work. The expanded schedule covered the gap between the last and first metro runs. Thanking the staff for "giving it their best", he said the data will be provided to the government and be discussed with Alternate Transportation Minister Konstantinos Kyranakis about introducing it on a permanent basis every Saturday, as of the Fall.
The STASY chief also announced that 350 staff would be hired on long-term basis for critical positions including station masters, technicians, and drivers. "Most of these will have been completed by September," he added.
An increase in passenger movement was also recorded in the tram and the selected bus routes that were on the same pilot program. "We saw a lot of people at the metro, at Neos Kosmos, who went to take the tram to go to the beach. Now, in the summer, the combination of having tram, buses, and metro is helpful to passengers to use the transport means" more, he said.
Kyranakis
"Athens 'did not sleep' last night," Minister Kyranakis said. "For the first time after 20 years, the entire system of mass transportation remained open all night and tens of thousands of young people used it at hours that up to yesterday provided limited choices and not always adequate ones, either."
In a social media post, he said that the outcome was "tens of thousands of young people who safely returned home and a city that showed it both wants to and can do something better." He added that the pilot plan was based on efforts by hundreds of transportation employees, who "did their job while the city enjoyed itself on a Saturday night."
Kyranakis said that the glitches would be worked on in coming weeks, and that the government was aiming at making the schedule extension a permanent one every Saturday, as of September.
Hatzidakis
Deputy Prime Minister Hatzidakis recalled that when he held the transportation portfolio and wanted to extend the schedule for the Athens metro and the electric train (Line 1) on Fridays and Saturdays, he was accused of trying to introduce "anti-labor and dangerous" practices. But now, young people have embraced the measure, he noted in a Tik Tok post, encouraging its contiuation as a way of serving youth and the public in general.