Athens Metro

During the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, spectators, personnel, and volunteers used public transit to travel to and from the more than 30 sports venues. Hundreds of thousands traveled through Metro stations and tunnels that Bechtel completed in 2003.

The 10-year design, construct, commission, and operate project — one of the most ambitious public works projects in Greek history — began in 1992. Few believed it could be completed by 2004.

Bechtel oversaw the work of a multinational consortium — including 22 Greek, French, and German companies — committed to preserving antiquities and archaeological relics encountered in the process of excavating in soft soil, in an already-congested central city, under centuries-old structures.

That meant for slow work at times. Discovering, investigating, and cataloging archaeological finds added an estimated two years to the project. The effort yielded a collection of national treasures, some of which are exhibited in Metro stations.

The $3.4 billion, 28-station subway system consists of two lines radiating in four directions along more than 27 kilometers (17 miles) of track from Syntagma Square, in central Athens.

Project History

Long before Athens won its bid for the 2004 Olympic Games, it was clear that the city needed a better way to move people around. Athens built one of Europe’s first urban rail grids in 1869, but it could not keep up with the country’s swift urbanization. About 4 million people, almost 40 percent of the Greek population, live in the capital.

Over the years, economic growth and prosperity have increased the number of cars in the city to nearly 2 million. By the 1970s, Athens had become almost as famous for its traffic congestion and pollution as for its Parthenon and bronze statue of Zeus. Because it sits in the bottom of a geological basin, a brown haze of nefos (smog) became a familiar sight above the historic city. The Greek government feared that construction would mean more traffic jams. And it worried that upgrading the existing subway would disturb the city below the city—the fragile relics, some 3,000 years old, buried beneath modern Athens. 

In 1992, Athens asked Bechtel to manage design and construction of a new metro system, the most ambitious public works project in Greek history. The job of building an 80-kilometer-per-hour railway beneath a busy capital was made even more complicated by the remnants of that history. A 4th century B.C. necropolis, the ruins of a 6th century B.C. aqueduct, and parts of an ancient Roman wall are just some of the 30,000 precious objects with which engineers had to contend. But the team completed the project while managing to burrow through Athens’ underground without sacrificing its artifacts, serving as a model for cultural preservation.

Today, the new metro system carries nearly 400,000 riders a day, effectively removing 200,000 cars from the streets. The system is curbing pollution, slicing commute times from 40 minutes to 10, and attracting visitors from all over Greece. Many of the artifacts that crews unearthed have been incorporated into the walls of the stations.