The new and colorful Athens Metro Line 1 (ISAP) trains did go viral on social media, giving an air of renewal to the problematic service, along with an AI system that detects ticket fraud. But Athenians will face another summer with overheated trains, on ISAP and on the metro, because a number of them still have no air-conditioning.
Passengers’ daily lives are often tested by infrequent routes and breakdowns, as happened recently when a train at the Nomismatokopio station was evacuated and withdrawn after indicating a technical failure.
ISAP remains the weakest link, where the approximately 19 services per hour during peak hours are barely achieved. “You start with 19, but along the way you may run out of trains,” sources with knowledge of the matter tell Kathimerini. All this at a time when passenger traffic on buses and the metro is on the rise. In the year’s first four months, passenger traffic on buses based on ticket validations has increased by 25% and on the metro it exceeds 9%.
“ISAP is changing,” was one of the messages sent by representatives of urban transport at an event of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, as the first batch of the 14 total reconstructed trains with over 40 years of life arrived at the Sepolia depot for testing.
