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Good practice Imported

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

Greece · Trikala · See the Greece profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 63% 62/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Since 2015 Trikala has used its own streets as an EU-funded automated-mobility testbed: CityMobil2 driverless minibuses made 1,490 trips carrying 12,138 passengers in mixed traffic; AVINT, SHOW and IN2CCAM pilots followed. No service has become permanent.

1,490
CityMobil2 trips (Aug 2015-Feb 2016)
12,138
CityMobil2 passengers carried (Aug 2015-Feb 2016)
42%
Trikala users riding shuttle 2-4 days/week (cross-site survey)
654 residents
Niavis et al. (2025) acceptance-study sample (2025)
€36.1 million
SHOW project funding (Horizon 2020, 20 cities)
9.6 km
SHOW mixed-traffic corridor length (2022-2024)
2.4 km
CityMobil2 route length
Trikala Automated Mobility Testbed — a Decade of Driverless-Shuttle Pilots in Live Mixed Traffic

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
e-Trikala S.A. (with ICCS/NTUA and CERTH-HIT)
Period
2015–present
Keywords
urban experimentation, living lab, autonomous vehicles, smart mobility, regulatory sandbox, public transport

Context

Trikala, a city of 78,605 residents in Thessaly, has positioned itself as Greece's smart-city pioneer since 2004 and since 2015 has repeatedly offered its live street network as a testbed for automated road transport, run by the municipal development company e-Trikala S.A.

Objectives

Four consecutive EU-funded pilots on the same corridor - CityMobil2 (2015-16), AVINT (2019-21), SHOW (2022-24) and IN2CCAM (2022-25) - aimed to test driverless shuttle operation in live mixed traffic and build lasting municipal capability and regulation around it.

Activities

CityMobil2 ran two fleets of six ten-passenger driverless shuttles on a 2.4 km city-centre loop, roughly 12 hours a day six days a week, sharing space with cars, cyclists and pedestrians at up to 20 km/h, free of charge. SHOW, a €36.1m Horizon 2020 project spanning 20 cities, later ran automated minivans, a robo-taxi and delivery robots on a 9.6 km mixed-traffic corridor; IN2CCAM added connected-vehicle infrastructure on the same route.

Results

CityMobil2 recorded 1,490 trips and 12,138 passengers between August 2015 and February 2016. A cross-site survey of over 1,500 users found Trikala the only demonstration city where riders used the shuttle as a genuine transport mode, with 42% riding 2-4 days a week - the highest usefulness rating of any site - corroborated by two peer-reviewed acceptance studies. Neither SHOW nor IN2CCAM has published Trikala-specific passenger or modal-shift figures.

Conclusions

Ten years and four EU projects built genuine municipal capability - an operator, a control centre, an equipped corridor, a national legal pathway (Law 4784/2021, Ministerial Decision 393352/2022) and a substantial acceptance-research dataset - but no permanent, revenue-bearing service; every deployment has ended when its grant ended, one minor safety incident occurred in November 2015, and the 2015 trial's removal of downtown parking drew unresolved public pushback over job displacement.

Implementation
Indicative cost
High (€500k–€5M) — SHOW (2022-2024) was a €36.1m Horizon 2020 consortium project spanning 20 cities; Trikala-specific cost shares and the CityMobil2/AVINT/IN2CCAM budgets are not separately published in the cited sources.
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — Four sequential EU-funded pilot phases from 2015 to 2025 (CityMobil2, AVINT, SHOW, IN2CCAM), each time-bound to its grant period with no permanent service established since.
Staffing & skills
e-Trikala S.A. (municipal development company) as local operator, Research partners ICCS/NTUA and CERTH-HIT, Ministry of Transport sign-off for each deployment, Onboard safety operators

Conditions for success

  • Sustained municipal institutional capability (dedicated operator, control centre) maintained across four consecutive EU-funded projects
  • A national regulatory framework built specifically from the pilot experience
  • Strong local rider-acceptance culture built over a decade of repeated trials

Common failure modes

  • Every deployment ended when its EU grant ended - no operating model for a permanent revenue-bearing service has emerged
  • One safety incident occurred (shuttle mounted a kerb after signal loss, November 2015, no injuries)
  • Removal of downtown parking drew unresolved public pushback over job displacement
  • SHOW and IN2CCAM have not published Trikala-specific outcome data to show continued impact

Commonly funded by

Horizon Europe

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Data sources

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