Trikala Automated Mobility Testbed — a Decade of Driverless-Shuttle Pilots in Live Mixed Traffic

Trikala, a city of 78,605 residents in Thessaly (2021 census), has since 2004 positioned itself as Greece's smart-city pioneer, and since 2015 has repeatedly offered its live street network as a testbed for automated road transport. The municipal development company e-Trikala S.A. has run four EU-funded pilots on the same corridor: CityMobil2 (2015–16), AVINT (2019–21), SHOW (2022–24) and IN2CCAM (2022–25).

The best-documented phase is CityMobil2. Two fleets of six ten-passenger driverless shuttles ran a 2.4 km city-centre loop with eight stops, roughly 12 hours a day, six days a week, sharing space with cars, cyclists, pedestrians and dogs at a maximum 20 km/h, free of charge. The operational record is specific: 1,490 trips and 12,138 passengers carried between August 2015 and February 2016. A cross-site evaluation surveying over 1,500 users across CityMobil2's demonstration cities found Trikala the only site where riders used the shuttle as a genuine transport mode rather than a novelty, with 42% of Trikala users riding 2–4 days a week — the highest usefulness rating of any demonstration city. Two peer-reviewed acceptance studies (Papadima et al. 2020; Niavis et al. 2025, surveying 654 Trikala residents) corroborate strong local acceptance.

The trial's most durable legacy is regulatory: Greece's Ministry of Transport built a national testing framework for driverless vehicles out of the Trikala experience (Law 4784/2021, Ministerial Decision 393352/2022), specifying a phased approval process, safety-operator requirements, and a 30 km/h cap without a driver aboard — a framework other member states could copy. Trikala then repeated the experiment three more times: AVINT planned a campus shuttle; SHOW (a €36.1m Horizon 2020 project spanning 20 cities) ran automated minivans, a robo-taxi and delivery robots on a 9.6 km mixed-traffic corridor from December 2022 to September 2024; IN2CCAM added connected-vehicle infrastructure on the same route through 2025.

Ten years and four EU projects have built a genuine municipal capability — an operator, a control centre, an equipped corridor, a national legal pathway and a substantial acceptance-research dataset — but no permanent, revenue-bearing service. Every deployment has ended when its grant ended. Neither SHOW nor IN2CCAM has published Trikala-specific passenger or modal-shift figures to match CityMobil2's operational data. One documented safety incident occurred on 26 November 2015, when a shuttle mounted a kerb after a signal loss; no injuries were reported and the pilot continued. The 2015 trial also removed downtown parking and drew mixed public reaction over job displacement, with no published follow-up on either concern.

Read the full analysis: https://show-project.eu/mega-sites-trikala/