The City of Athens, under Mayor Haris Doukas, is working to bring order to the chaotic e-scooter landscape that has taken over its streets, sidewalks, and parks, with dozens of scooters routinely abandoned upright or tossed on their sides, blocking pedestrian access. The city has finalized the placement of 1,574 designated parking spots across 124 zones throughout Athens, and construction work is already underway at several locations. The network is expected to be fully completed by summer.

However, many of the stricter measures passed by the Athens City Council back in November 2025, intended to rapidly and definitively transform how e-scooters operate in the city, will not move forward, after being rejected by the Decentralized Administration of Attica, the regional oversight body that must approve municipal decisions of this kind.

Specifically, the ban on e-scooter traffic along the pedestrianized stretch of Ermou Street, the pedestrian zones around the Acropolis, and Aiolou Street was not approved. In these areas, scooters will still be permitted to operate, but only at walking pace, capped at 6 km/h (about 4 mph). On sidewalks, e-scooters remain prohibited entirely, while on regular roads the standard maximum speed of 25 km/h applies (scooters may not access roads with speed limits above 50 km/h, under current Greek law).

The regional authority also rejected a city measure that would have allowed for the immediate removal of illegally parked scooters and the imposition of fines, a provision that had already drawn fierce opposition from e-scooter rental companies.

According to City Hall sources, what municipal staff can currently do when they spot an abandoned scooter is notify the operator, issue a violation notice, and, only if the scooter remains in the same spot five hours later, arrange for removal. The problem, as Deputy Mayor for Urban Regeneration and Resilience Maro Evangelidou explained in an interview, is that just serving the notice can take up to five days. “We have no choice but to operate within the limits of explicit legal authorization,” she said. “For instance, we as the municipal authority want the option to lock scooters for safety reasons — but the law doesn’t provide for that. We want to be able to collect abandoned ones. The law doesn’t provide for that either.”

The matter is expected to be discussed at the Athens City Council session on Thursday, May 14.