Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece, with over 1M citizens in the metropolitan area. Situated in Northern Greece, Thessaloniki covers an area of 1.455,68 km2 with an average density of 665,2 inhabitants per km2. The total number of vehicles in the city exceeds 777.544, including passenger cars, buses, heavy and lightweight vehicles, motorcycles, bikes and shared modes. The public transport system of Thessaloniki consists of the public bus system operated by the Organization of Urban Transportation of Thessaloniki (OASTH), while the new metro is currently in the final stage of its construction and expected to operate by the end of 2024. Due to its geographical location, Thessaloniki plays an important social, financial, and commercial role in northern Greece and the greater Balkan region. The Port of Thessaloniki is located on the Orient-East Med Core Network Corridor of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) and is connected to regional transport networks, while there is also a direct railway connection to the national network.

The case study of thessaloniki will focus on:

• The main corridors/roads that connect the peri-urban area with the Thessaloniki Port (two main Port Gates) through the TEN-T and urban network, where freight truck flows, freight train traffic, private vehicle flows and urban delivery flows co-exist,
• the Peripheral Ring Road, which handles a significant portion of the daily commute traffic from East to West and from West to East, where a new infrastructure (Flyover) will be constructed and is expected to significantly impact the operations of the Peripheral Ring Road as well as the core urban network
• the main urban road network, where illegal parking, recurring congestion as well as unplanned events (e.g., road closures) result to increased delays, reduced road safety and major impacts of traffic on the environment.

The Case Study of Thessaloniki will utilize all the services of the SYNCHROMODE Toolbox and will implement those in real-world and simulated use cases that will cover:

• Efficient, equitable, safety-oriented, and environmentally friendly traffic management.
• Resilient traffic management.
• Predictive traffic management.
• Low-level traffic management, accounting for individual vehicles’ and travelers’ behavior and patterns.
• Multimodal traffic management and mode synchronization.
• AI assisted traffic management scenarios.
• Transport demand and supply balancing.
• Cooperation between TMCs and public/private transport actors.
• Provision of novel traffic management supporting services (e.g., Mode and route choice advice, Elastic time of departure advice, Parking as a service).
• Utilization of multi-source data, including data from the National Access Point.

The above are expected to provide significant and measurable solutions to recurring as well as expected mobility, traffic and congestion related problems of the City of Thessaloniki.