Greece: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Alexandroupoli has one driving restriction on our books: the Τροποποίηση του εγκεκριμένου ρυμοτομικού σχεδίου πόλεως Αλεξανδρούπολης… (limited traffic zone). What is a limited traffic zone?
Sources last read on 2026-09-24, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2026-12-23.
Alexandroupoli is the last Greek city on the road east before the Turkish border, the Egnatia Odos runs past it, and its harbour is the mainland end of the crossing to Samothraki — so a visiting driver usually arrives with a car and parks near the seafront.
Two published acts, seven years apart, decide what happens on the streets behind that seafront. 🔑 The first is a presidential decree of 21 October 2021, published in ΦΕΚ Δ' 855 on 30 November 2021, which amends the city's approved town plan at block Ο.Τ. 277 and turns two stretches into a pedestrian street eight metres wide: a stretch of οδός Νικ.
Φωκά from λεωφόρος Δημοκρατίας to οδός Ειρήνης, and a stretch of οδός Ειρήνης from οδός Νικ. Φωκά to οδός Ψαρρών. Like the Patras decree in this corpus it is a town-planning instrument rather than a traffic order: it does not order signs, it changes what those two stretches legally are, and the Highway Code then does the prohibiting.
Its Article 2 fixes force on publication with no condition attached, so the commencement date here is real. 🔑 The second is the municipality's own pedestrian-street regulation, «Κανονισμός λειτουργίας των πεζοδρόμων του Δήμου Αλεξανδρούπολης», gazetted in ΦΕΚ Β' 2549 on 18 August 2016 inside the approval of the second phase of the city's traffic study.
That regulation is what makes this record unusually complete for a Greek pedestrianisation: it says in its own first article that it governs the pedestrian streets of the municipality's settlements «υφιστάμενους και μελλοντικούς» — existing and future — and then sets out, clause by clause, who may drive on one, at what speed, and at what hours a shop may be resupplied. 🚨 Two limits belong next to all of that.
Five years have passed since the decree and it ordered no works, no signs and no completion date; this project holds nothing that says what is built at that junction today.
And the operative sentence of the decree cannot be read out of the gazette's own PDF — the column it sits in uses a subset font with no character map — so its wording below is quoted from the gazette's full-text search index instead, with the accents and capitals restored. That is stated wherever it matters rather than hidden. 🆕 A third strand was measured on 24 September 2026 and it does not change the rule above.
Alexandroupoli also closes its seafront and several central streets to vehicles on summer evenings — but by a separate act passed afresh every year under the Highway Code, not by the town plan.
ΦΕΚ Β' 3404/13.06.2024, ΦΕΚ Β' 1775/10.04.2025 and ΦΕΚ Β' 2669/13.05.2026 each approve one season, each names its own start and end date, and the evening window moved from 18:00–24:00 in 2024 to 20:00–01:00 in 2025 and again in 2026.
The 2026 season ended on 20 September 2026 and no act for 2027 had been gazetted when this was written, so none of it is encoded here as a timetable; it is set out under `how_to_comply` so that a driver arriving in summer knows to look for that year's act. 🔑 Those same acts also report, in passing, that parts of οδός Ζαρίφη and οδός Κουντουριώτου are already pedestrian streets under the current town plan — which is how this page learned that the conversion below is not the only one in the city centre.