The long-running drama of Nicosia’s Makarios Avenue has a new act. This much-battered street was closed for redevelopment, reopened with traffic restrictions and priority for pedestrians, and now faces being handed back to private cars in full. Why? Because the powers that be have pinned the emptying-out of the capital’s centre on these 650 metres of road. And their solution? Cars! Kafkaesque? To us, perhaps. To those in charge, apparently not so much.
And all this in a city where, for more than a decade, the malls have been dragging a hefty share of trade out to the edges. Where sky-high rents and property prices make it ever harder to live or do business in the centre. Where the city now sprawls all the way to Dali and Kokkinotrimithia. Where the universities were built outside the core, and young people keep moving out towards the countryside. And now we expect the student, the schoolkid, the office worker to spend half an hour or more getting to Makarios to do what, exactly? Grab a coffee? Shop at a chain they can probably find five minutes from home or work?
Friends of the Earth and Limassol Municipality co-organised a discussion titled ‘Creating an inclusive city’ as part of European Mobility Week 2026. There, architect, urban planner and University of Cyprus architecture professor Socrates Stratis presented an exercise his students had carried out on Makarios. It found that, in retail floor space, a single shopping centre is worth roughly one and a half Makarios Avenues.
So with two big malls, Nicosia has in effect built three “Makarios Avenues” outside the centre, all competing with the real thing.
At the same event, Paris Nikolaou, a lecturer and head of the Transport Engineering Laboratory at the Cyprus University of Technology, raised another telling factor: political culture. “I’ve had people in high places tell me that Cyprus’s problem is infrastructure, that it needs more roads, flyovers. And this from the people who make the decisions!”
So what exactly is our politicians’ vision for the Cyprus of the future? If we’re aiming for a country that looks more and more like Qatar, China and Dubai, all multi-lane highways and gigantic malls, let’s just say so. Let’s drop the hypocritical pledges about micromobility, microclimates and sustainable development. Maybe that’s a solution of sorts to the “emptying-out”, too: drain the city of people and fill the streets with cars. So the eye can gorge on traffic! And once we’ve opened up Makarios, why not keep going? Why stop there? Open up Ledra Street too. And Onasagorou. Run cars through Athalassa Park and Academy Park. And along the Pedieos! Ban not just e-scooters but bicycles. And pedestrians. Why put them in harm’s way? Build more bridges, more lanes, more bypasses.
Tongue-in-cheek as this may sound, it’s worth knowing that transport experience worldwide recorded the phenomenon years ago. It’s called induced demand: when road capacity goes up, journey times fall at first, but easier driving can create extra demand for cars, and for yet more roads built just for them. Until there isn’t an inch left for anything else. And if those fill up too? Build more. Flying ones!
