Greece: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Karpathos has one driving restriction on our books: the «την απαγόρευση εισόδου οχημάτων εντός της παραλιακής οδού Πηγαδιών από… (limited traffic zone). What is a limited traffic zone?
Sources last read on 2026-09-28, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2026-12-28.
Πηγάδια is the harbour town of Karpathos, the long thin island between Crete and Rhodes, and for six months of the year its seafront is closed to traffic in the evening.
The act's operative sentence is one long one: «Εγκρίνουμε τις κυκλοφοριακές ρυθμίσεις στην Δημοτική Κοινότητα Καρπάθου και συγκεκριμένα την απαγόρευση εισόδου οχημάτων εντός της παραλιακής οδού Πηγαδιών από το Αμφιθέατρο μέχρι το λιμάνι με τοποθέτηση (2) δυο πινακίδων (Ρ-7) … για την περίοδο από 15 Απριλίου έως και 15 Οκτωβρίου κάθε έτους και για τις ώρες από 19:00 έως τη 01:00».
Two no-entry signs, at two positions the act fixes in survey coordinates, close roughly 350 metres of quayside from seven in the evening until one the next morning. 🚨 AND THEN THE ACT OPENS IT AGAIN FOR THE FERRY, AND THAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCE ON THIS PAGE: «Εξαιρείται η περίοδος δύο (2) ώρες πριν και δύο (2) ώρες μετά από την άφιξη και την αναχώρηση αντίστοιχα της ακτοπλοϊκής γραμμής».
The exempt period is two hours before the arrival and two hours after the departure — respectively — of the coastal shipping line. 🔑 No other exception in this corpus is measured from a timetable somebody else publishes. Every Greek closure held here opens by clock, by calendar, by vehicle class or by a plate on the post; this one opens when a ship is due.
Since the whole closure lasts only six hours, a single evening sailing can lift most of it or all of it — and nothing in the gazette says when the ship comes. 🚫 THIS RECORD THEREFORE CANNOT TELL YOU WHETHER THE ROAD IS OPEN AT A GIVEN MINUTE, AND IT SAYS SO RATHER THAN PRETENDING OTHERWISE.
The timetable below encodes the closure the act prints and leaves the ferry carve-out out of it, because the carve-out has no hours to encode: it has a ship.
If you are driving the quay between 19:00 and 01:00 in season, look up the sailings for Κάρπαθος on the day, and read the two signs — they are what stands on the ground. 🔑 THE SIGN AND THE AUTHORITY'S OWN WORDS AGREE HERE, WHICH IS WORTH STATING BECAUSE THEY DO NOT ALWAYS. The sentence says «απαγόρευση εισόδου οχημάτων» and the sign it orders is Ρ-7, which ν.
5209/2025 article 7 §3 ζ) defines as «Απαγορεύεται η είσοδος σε όλα τα οχήματα» — no entry for all vehicles. The act's prose merely leaves out the word «όλα». 🚫 Do not read a residents' or frontage-access exemption into that: Ρ-7 has none of its own, unlike the Ρ-55 pedestrian-street sign most Greek towns in this corpus use, and this act prints no supplementary plate at all.