The gist of the regulations is that cars whose plates end in the digits 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 will alternate daily with those ending in 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0 within the five-square-mile restricted area of central Athens, Since these measures hold only for the five-day work week, those who may drive on Monday, Wednesday and Friday during one week may drive only on Tuesday and Thursday during the week following. With shopping hours staggered as usual, if one’s list of presumably simple errands includes going to the post office (closed afts., Sat., Sun., and St. Zeno’s day; different hours for stamps, parcels, registered mail), picking up film at a camera shop (closed Wed.), visiting the barber’s (closed Tues), dropping off clothing at the cleaners (closed Sat.), purchasing a kilo of kima (closed afts. except Fri.) and keeping an appointment in central Athens (see above), it takes the planning expertise of a university registrar to program these six tasks in the span of a week. The bewilderment expressed by foreign business people that Greeks, for all their apparent industriousness, are so unproductive, is quite easy to explain.
It can be argued, however, that there are more important things in life than mere productivity. The present regulations in Athens develop programming skills, strengthen memory pegs, and, what is so important in Greek life, they reinforce the ability to forget former systems. A man arrested in November blamed his infringement of the law on his forgetting to forget the former odd-even restrictions. The man was let off with the reprimand that he make better use of his head. Above all, the bane of modern life, uniformity, has been successfully avoided. With traffic and shopping arrangements as they are today, how can two days be anything alike?
The reason for these new and ingenious circulation measures is to outwit those Athenians, who, in response to the former odd-even restrictions, bought a second car with a terminal digit that allowed them to drive around central Athens every day. If a major preoccupation of the average citizen is how to circumvent the law, any self-respecting government — even the government of Change – feels it has to surpass him in cunning and subtlety. To make sure that it holds and keeps the upper hand, the present government has slyly added (lest there are some who are tempted now to purchase ten cars) that it will change the system again, and at will. The possibilities for allaghi here are, of course, rich in potential, alternating the first and the last half of the alphabet in regard to the initial letter on the license plate; odd-even based on the sum of the four numbers; 1 to 5 and 6 to 0 formulated on the square root of the penultimate number, etc., etc. Since every Athenian carries a computeraki these days, there should be no problem. The whole matter is just another example of the fussy teacher (government) – obstreperous pupil (citizen) relationship which helps give the country that big, happy boarding school atmosphere we are all familiar with.
So, everything – or, more pre-cisely, half of everything — got off to a wonderful start on November 2. But sad to say, everything ground to a halt within twenty-four hours. Quite un-expectedly, all the trolley and bus drivers went on strike, and – believe it or not, but it is true — their striking-hour schedule was even more complicated than the traffic regulations or the shopping hours. As a result, the government, to avoid further chao^ had to lift the bans which had been declared air-tight three days earlier. Of course, amid all this sport, everyone had forgotten that the purpose of the traffic restrictions was to reduce pollution, and the nefos — which is Athens in its Mr. Hyde aspect -prowled down from the sky, making the chaos very murky.
Notwithstanding this setback, the government’s total war against the private auto opened on a new front later in the month when it announced that, while no other new taxes were planned for the immediate future, import duties on cars, already staggering, would be doubled on January 1, 1983.
Environmentalists, it must be admitted, have said that it is the sorry state of our ageing vehicles that is a main source of pollution in Athens, and new duties will force drivers to hold on to their old equipment. Giving no quarter to this, the government announced its intention to put into effect enforced, authorized car check-ups, a matter proposed some time ago, but never implemented. Some believe that this psychological warfare is being employed so that if the government decides to call for mandatory filter systems on all vehicles, drivers will, by that time, acquiesce to the cost in order to preserve their sanity.
Victory, however, is not quite in sight. Last month, a group of foreign anti-pollution experts blandly expressed the opinion that the causes of pollution in Athens have never been rationally studied. A week later, the Minister of Public Works said that no plan or project has ever been prepared to solve the city’s traffic problem. Both statements, therefore, seemed to imply that all measures taken so far have not been based on reality. Greek reality, as is known, is something else. If many felt, at this point, that the whole situation was back to square one, they may have been over-optimistic. It was announced late last month that there are probably over six thousand cars operating now in Athens with counterfeit license plates. How the faculty is going to handle this kind of student indiscipline remains to be seen.
There is no reason to despair. All traffic restrictions will be lifted for a month starting on December 15. This is to accommodate shoppers (and shopkeepers) around Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and those that derive their names from SS Eleutherios, Dionysios, Evgenios, Stefanos, Vassilis, Theodosias and John the Baptist. As these, along with Christos, Christina, Manolis, Fotini and Fotis — constituting about half the total population of Athens — all celebrate their namedays during this period and expect callers at home, bearing sweets and flowers, there can be little done at the time other than driving around the center of the city. No doubt, a strict government warning will be directed at the nefos to follow upright, Christian principles during this festive, holy season.
