Greece: 2 schemes to know about before you drive in.
Thessaloniki has 2 driving restrictions on our books: the Έγκριση τροποποίησης του ωραρίου φορτοεκφόρτωσης εμπορευμάτων στον Δήμο… (heavy vehicle ban) and the Τροποποίηση του εγκεκριμένου ρυμοτομικού σχεδίου του Δήμου Θεσσαλονίκης… (limited traffic zone). What is a heavy vehicle ban?
Sources last read on 2026-09-25, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2026-12-23.
| Scheme | Kind | Fine |
|---|---|---|
| Έγκριση τροποποίησης του ωραρίου φορτοεκφόρτωσης εμπορευμάτων στον Δήμο Θεσσαλονίκης (υπ' αρ. 52/2024 απόφαση της Μητροπολιτικής Επιτροπής Μητροπολιτικής Ενότητας Θεσσαλονίκης, ΦΕΚ Β' 6645/06.12.2024) | heavy vehicle ban | €150.00 |
| Τροποποίηση του εγκεκριμένου ρυμοτομικού σχεδίου του Δήμου Θεσσαλονίκης για τον καθορισμό τμήματος της οδού Ασημάκη Φωτήλα, μεταξύ των οδών Κατσάνου και Παπαδιαμαντοπούλου, ως πεζόδρομου (ΦΕΚ Δ' 749/01.11.2024), με την έγκριση του αποκλεισμού της κυκλοφορίας οχημάτων (ΦΕΚ Β' 1828/26.03.2024) | limited traffic zone | €350.00 |
Thessaloniki is Greece's second city, the port the Balkans drive down to and the road gateway to Halkidiki, and its whole municipality runs one clock for goods vehicles. 🔑 The act in force is decision 52/2024 of the Metropolitan Committee of the Metropolitan Unit of Thessaloniki, gazetted in ΦΕΚ Β' 6645 on 6 December 2024.
In its own words it applies «Σε όλες τις οδούς του Δήμου Θεσσαλονίκης» — on every street of the municipality — and it permits a goods vehicle of up to 8 tonnes payload to stop at the kerb to load or unload only from 19:00 in the evening until 07:00 the next morning on Monday to Friday, and from 17:00 on Saturday until 07:00 on Monday. Public holidays are free.
Everything else in the scheme is a narrower permission laid on top of that one: lorries up to 3.5 tonnes payload may also work 10:00 to 12:00 Monday to Saturday and lorries up to 1.5 tonnes 10:00 to 14:00, but in both cases «αποκλειστικά και μόνο στις θέσεις φορτοεκφόρτωσης» — in marked loading bays and nowhere else. 🔑 Three errands are exempt around the clock and they are unusually specific: ice and ice cubes up to 3.5 tonnes between 1 April and 30 October, medicines and pharmaceutical supplies up to 1.5 tonnes all year, and purely electric goods vehicles up to 1.5 tonnes all year.
That last one is a propulsion exemption rather than an emission class, and it is the only place in this scheme where what is under the bonnet changes the answer. 🚨 This record replaced a predecessor rather than joining it.
The same committee's decision 57/2018, gazetted in ΦΕΚ Β' 6178 on 31 December 2018, set a different clock — 20:30 to 08:30 on weekdays — and listed twenty-nine named pedestrian streets with loading windows of their own. Paragraph 5 of the 2024 decision repeals «οποιαδήποτε άλλη διάταξη αναφέρεται στην υπ' αρ. 57/2018 (Β' 6178) απόφαση», so the 2018 hours and the 2018 street lists are history and are not encoded here.
They are described below only so that a reader who meets the older act, or an older sign, knows which one this page is about. ⚠️ Nothing here restricts a car. This is a goods-vehicle timetable, and a visitor in a hire car meets it only if they are driving a van on a delivery.
This is a short street in central Thessaloniki that stopped being a street for cars, and it is here because the project could follow the conversion from end to end in the gazette — which is rarer in Greece than it sounds. 🔑 Greek law runs pedestrianisation as an «ενιαία διαδικασία», a single procedure with two halves that are published separately, and both halves of this one exist.
The traffic half is ΦΕΚ Β' 1828 of 26 March 2024, in which the Secretary of the Decentralised Administration of Macedonia and Thrace approved the municipal council's decision «όσον αφορά στον αποκλεισμό της κυκλοφορίας οχημάτων στο τμήμα της Δημοτικής οδού Ασημάκη Φωτήλα, μεταξύ των οδών Κατσάνου και Παπαδιαμαντοπούλου» — the exclusion of vehicle traffic from that stretch — and recorded that the approval covers «μόνο τα μόνιμα μέτρα ρύθμισης της κυκλοφορίας», permanent measures only.
The planning half is ΦΕΚ Δ' 749 of 1 November 2024, in which the Deputy Regional Governor for Infrastructure and Networks of Central Macedonia amended the town plan to designate the same stretch «ως πεζόδρομου», and whose Article 2 fixes force on publication with no condition attached. 🚨 The order matters more than it looks.
The traffic decision suspends itself until the planning one happens: it says in its own words «Οι κυκλοφοριακές ρυθμίσεις της παρούσης ισχύουν με την ολοκλήρωση της διαδικασίας τροποποίησης του ρυμοτομικού σχεδίου του υπό παρέμβαση οδικού τμήματος και εφαρμόζονται με την τοποθέτηση - εγκατάσταση της σχετικής κατακόρυφης - οριζόντιας σήμανσης».
Three other Thessaloniki streets carry the same approval and the same suspending sentence and have no planning act in the gazette, so they are not on this page and are not closed as far as this project can source. 🚨 Two limits belong next to all of that.
The second condition — the signs — cannot be dated from any published act, so what is written here is what the street legally is, not what is standing at the kerb. 🆕 And the municipality's own pedestrian-street regulation — «ΚΑΝΟΝΙΣΜΟΣ ΛΕΙΤΟΥΡΓΙΑΣ ΠΕΖΟΔΡΟΜΩΝ ΔΗΜΟΥ ΘΕΣΣΑΛΟΝΙΚΗΣ», cited by the traffic act and approved by municipal council decision 1712/19-12-2016 — is now held and read.
It is not in the gazette and it never was: the municipality publishes it itself, as a PDF on its own «Κανονιστικές Αποφάσεις» page under the Διεύθυνση Έργων Αναπλάσεων και Συντηρήσεων Δημοσίου Χώρου. So who may drive here by exception is stated below, from the regulation's own Article 4, and is no longer a thing this page has to say it does not know. 🚨 The route to it is worth more than the document.
ΦΕΚ Β' 1828 prints the decision's ΑΔΑ as «7ΣΠΗΩΡ5-ΑΩ3», and that key returns nothing whatever in Διαύγεια; the decision is filed under «7ΣΠΗΩΡ5-Α3Ω», the last two characters the other way round.
Both were put to the register's own open-data search on 2026-09-25 — 0 results and 1 result, the one result being decision 1712/2016 ΑΔΣ of 19 December 2016 of Δήμος Θεσσαλονίκης, «την επανέγκριση του Κανονισμού Λειτουργίας πεζοδρόμων του Δήμου Θεσσαλονίκης». A published lookup key can be wrong, and a zero-result lookup on one is not evidence that the document does not exist.