The Heraklion City Council has approved its long-awaited Urban Accessibility Plan, to tackle one of the city’s most visible problems: how to move around on foot without risking life and limb.
Mayor Alexis Kalokairinos called the plan “a useful tool for upcoming designs,” noting that the same team that developed the Old Town traffic study created it. “They know the city well, and they have given us instruments that are already being institutionalized,” he said.
The mayor did not sugarcoat the current situation, admitting that Heraklion has what he called “negative sidewalks.” “Fifty or sixty centimeters wide, useless at best, dangerous at worst. We must accept this reality and work to reverse it,” he remarked, adding that elevated crossings and pedestrian routes are now part of the toolbox, though funding remains patchy.
Deputy Mayor for Technical Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility Giorgos Sisamakis emphasized that accessibility has been a “consistent strategic goal” for the municipality, despite the city’s built environment presenting a constant challenge. He pointed to specific projects, such as redesigning parts of the Venetian Walls to accommodate visually impaired residents and constructing seven kilometers of new pedestrian routes with tactile paving and ramps.
The plan itself sets out interventions for sidewalks, public buildings, transit, and open spaces, all tied into the city’s GIS mapping system. It also proposes continuous accessible routes—the so-called “accessibility chain”—to connect key services and public areas.
The Funding Elephant in the Room
Kalokairinos used the occasion to revisit a familiar grievance: the Green Fund. While Heraklion has contributed nearly €100 million in local resources, the mayor said returns have been “minimal.” “Even half of that money could have transformed the city,” he argued, insisting that the issue is not about begging for funds but about local authorities controlling their own resources.
“We do not ask for handouts,” he said. “These are local funds, and local government must have the right to manage them.” A pointed reminder that while Heraklion fights for ramps and crossings, Athens still holds the purse strings.
For now, Heraklion remains a city where residents joke about sidewalks being “museum exhibits”—visible but unusable. The Accessibility Plan is supposed to change that, at least on paper. Whether elevated crossings and tactile paving will survive the city’s construction chaos is, as always, another matter.
Reality Check
Official timeline: 2025–2027.
Local timeline: ask again in 2035.
Money issue: €100M paid into the Green Fund, peanuts returned.
