Tomorrow’s decision makers are beginning to realize the importance of making known to their communities and politicians their concerns on the issue of environmental catastrophe that looms in the very near future if people don’t act soon.
After my previous post on Earth Hour and another post on disappearing beaches, I have decided to emphasize again the importance of awareness campaigns on our changing environment.
Being a resident of Athens, I would like to encourage people to participate and sponsor an initiative from a St. Catherine’s student, Anna Trepekli, called “IT’S GETTING HOT! SO WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO?”
The campaign aims at inviting students from all over the nation to participate on a competition by submitting their ideas by forms of essays, photos, poems, arts, songs, video clips, etc. and the winner in each category will win a bicycle. Currently, they are still looking for sponsors for donations of bicycles among other forms of sponsorship.
I remember reading a news report not long ago about that Athens will have too many cars in the near future that we will not be able to move around even if we have cars, so by encouraging local authorities to think about bicycles as a way of alternative transportation and better public transportation planning, we will reduce traffic jams and carbon dioxide emissions.
Speaking of better public transportation planning, the current public transportation bus routes are quite inefficient in Athens. Currently, nearly all the buses in Athens pass through downtowns unnecessarily. But, there is no express bus service that can take passengers from south eastern suburbs to Mesogeion St. or the Katexaki Metro Station, which can reduce a lot of car owners from driving on the over-crowded Katexaki motorway.
If the city transportation planners take a look at other cities around the world, other cities have arranged their bus routes so efficiently that some buses run only on the north-south direction routes while other buses run only on the east-west direction routes. Since the streets in Athens are not so straight, north-south or east-west routes may not be applicable, however, each bus route can still be rearranged to run only in a certain smaller region, and a person can travel from point A to point B by a simple transferring from one bus route to another without having to pass through the downtown area unnecessarily.
