Traffic Management Where Old Greek Road Met the New
The Olympia Odos project—largest of the five concessionaires with an original contract of more than $2 billion, now restructured in a reduced scope to $1.4 billion—comes with its share of Olympic-sized challenges. In the task of upgrading the 63.2-km-long Elefsina-Corinth route and the 18.3-km Patras Bypass and building the 120-km Corinth-Patras link, the Vinci and Hochtief-led construction team had to blend the old with the new.
“We built on top of the old national road,” says Marc Milosevic, chief technical officer for the concessionaire team, which includes Vinci, Hochtief, Aktor, J&P-Avax, Athena and Gek Terna. While crews tried to build over the mostly one-lane, 1960s-era old road as much as possible, there were still more than 100 sections where the two alignments interacted, requiring traffic maintenance on a heavily traveled road.