Bus overtourism overcrowds Leura village amenity

Fifty buses a day – huge tourist coaches and mini-buses – concentrate on retail Leura Mall.

It’s crazy and unfair.   Bus congestion dominates Leura daily due to corporate tourism promotion of the Blue Mountains and specifically Leura to encourage the inbound tourist trade.

But has Leura’s retail, attractions and accommodation benefitted?  No.

A local council traffic survey of just 200 metres along the retail section of The Mall in June 2018 recorded more than 9,200 cars travelling up and down Leura Mall on a weekday, 7390 cars on a weekend, and 54 tourist buses on one Saturday.

Try visiting Leura on a sunny day between 10am and 2pm either The Mall or in Megalong Street around the corner!  Tourist buses flock from Sydney and arrive one after the other to use Leura as a twenty minute toilet stop, before feeding their throng into Scenic World’s escarpment Disneyland by the many hundreds.  Leura has become Echo Pointed.

The number of tourist buses has been of increasing concern for Leura residents.  Coach drivers park anywhere and everywhere.  In Megalong Street they obscure the vision of drivers coming out of the Woolworths carpark.  Pedestrian traffic on the footpath is also overcrowded along retail section of The Mall – mostly window shoppers off the buses.

Mall shop owners don’t benefit from additional retail sales from these groups of bus tourists because the bus tour operators don’t allocated enough time.  May be ten minutes is allowed by the tour schedules at Leura after toileting for sample window shopping and stretching the legs at best, depending upon the length of the toilet queue.  The visitor experience for bus tourists to Leura is just awful, but the tour operators can just tick off their Blue Mountains brochure:  Leura √.

Council contract cleaners have to clean Leura’s public toilet many times a day.

Leura Public Toilet was never intended or designed as a toilet stop for frequent multiple tour buses from Sydney.  If it was it would be like the 5 star one out at Mayfield Gardens off the massive car and bus park before entry.   Yet there is no parking fee recouped from the exploitative bus companies.  Local ratepayers bear the financial and congestion burden; tourists get a free toilet stop.  For most of the Sydney day tripping buses, Leura is the first planned stop.  Only the high end coaches like AAT Kings include a toilet on board the coach.  But the cheap white monocultural bus trips don’t, so Council’s Leura loo has defaulted into the prime toilet stop for many low-cost bus day trips to the Blue Mountains.

Instead, a dedicated bus rest facility further down the highway would be more appropriate, professional and sustainably respectful of the locals of Leura.   So why not a toilet stop at Council’s Glenbrook Visitor Information Centre?  After all it’s accredited and there’s convenient drive in parking for a number of buses outbound from Sydney just off the highway.  As a former coach captain, I know this could be a 20 minute convenience stop with a bit more Blue Mountains promo thrown in.

Why do the tour bus companies have to rely upon this Leura Public Toilet?   It’s a public toilet not a tourist bus toilet for fifty plus at a time.  The tour bus companies are just exploiting and profiting from Leura and Blue Mountains ratepayers fork the cost.

Else why not charge for the Leura public toilet use like they do overseas, like in Paris?  A two dollar coin per 5 minute cubical use would well fund permanently employed cleaners and supplies, given the daily patronage from Sydney.

Perhaps Leura Public Toilet deserves its own TripAdvisor account – worst places to do your business?

Perhaps one at the Wenty Falls servo, and it’s even got an escarpment view to boot!   Multimillion Scenic World has the cash to buy it off BP, and Scenic World could cash in and pre-sell its escarpment rides there to boot!

Local Leuralian L. D. observes:  “Once upon a time Leura was the quaint little village where travellers in private cars would always stop to stretch their legs, have a coffee breakor brunch or lunch and often indulge in a little retail therapy before they continued on their way.  In my view a tourist coach and mini bus free village could be the first step towards Leura regaining its lost charm and ambi­ence.”

But when the Great Western Highway was widened what did locals expect?  Faster access and increased volume of traffic from Sydney was to be the outcome.  Daytrippers were destined to replace the overnight and extended stayers.  Leura’s carrying capacity was to be impacted.  The RMS calls Mount Victoria a suburb.

An ideal layover bus parking location could have been what was the vacant triangular land off the highway off ramp on the eastern approach to Leura immediately east of the ugly Spires apartments – the building that has that clock that never works.

This suggestion had been proposed by Leura local R.M. in 2016 at a council-community consultation meeting.  He wisely predicted the huge rise in tourists predicted for the next 20 years and that only a drop-off/pick-up zone adjacent to Leura village centre would be able to cater for the expected and encouraged volumes of coach traffic to come.

“I believe the only reasonable long-term approach is to commission a report on arrivals,” he said.  But instead, local council approved more apartments to fill the vacant land site.

Or before Leura’s ‘Aunty Joan Cooper Bridge’ over the highway was designed and built in 2005, local council could well have had the RTA incorporate a large tourist bus parking layover area plus a safe interconnecting walkway across to The Mall from what is now a vacant grass lot on the north side of the tunnel/bridge opposite the old Chateau Napier site.

So two obvious missed opportunities by council’s town planning to prepare to cope with the massive tourist influx that council itself has long been encouraging.  Even a passenger drop-off/pick-up zone could have been planned for.

Three years ago, local council decided upon a tourist bus parking layover area outside The Ritz in The Mall and a new roundabout at the intersection of Craigend Street so tourist buses can do a u-turn to the bus parking area.

But the proposed parking area would only fit five large coaches parallel parked.  Reverse parking bus activity would also be inherently hazardous.

Leuralian I.M. slammed the decision as “terrible”.  “It just doesn’t work. The proposal is worse than what we’ve got at the moment, which has been going for four-and-a-half years.

“It’s going to lose 24 car parking spaces – Leura doesn’t have any proper parking so to lose 24 is disastrous.  It would create pedestrian chaos around the Mall/Megalong street intersection and was needlessly expensive, including an estimated $250,000 to build the roundabout.”

What was that Leura Vil­lage Business Survey all about?  Wishfull thinking? Or more rate rises planned?

Leura is being adversely impacted by overtourism syndrome – in which locals are losing out to concentrated mass tourism influx, congestion and overcrowding.

Overtourism is when tourism exceeeds the carrying capacity of a destination/attraction; a situation where too many people visit a specific place for safety or comfort reasons – such as toileting.

Overtourism is worse than mass tourism. Overtourism is when mass tourism is scheduled for overcrowding – congestion, landscape disturbance, and ultimately development touristification of the destination which ends up devaluing the appeal and visitation experience.

So welcome to Leura at lunchtime.

The excessive volume of budget bus day trippers also take over Leura and so detract from the visitor experience sought by the high-end extended stay and independent tourist – the ones that actually spend real money into the Leura small business economy.

Observes Leuralian C.O.:   “Where’s the serenity?  How long will it take local council to wake up to the fact that tourism is destroying the once serene village of Leura?   Nowhere in Europe would a village of this size allow huge tourist coaches (double decker) to jam its main street.  A simple step in the right direction is to erect signs at both ends of Leura Mall: “Tour buses not permitted”.

B.D. of Leura likens the daily tourist bus crowds as “a fast spreading and unstoppable virus.”

“It touches our way of living, the appearance of our envi­ronment, the way we police our lives and even our shopping habits.”

So becoming the Mountains equivalent of The Rocks and Bondi – CCTV, credit card parking metres, licence plate surveillance cameras…

“The type of tourist that is now visiting Leura as compared with even those only five years ago, has changed.  Bus­es disgorge tourists by the thousands. They are time poor and use Leura toilet facilities at great cost to council. They are of little economic value to Leura shopkeepers as they spend very little and how to keep that sustainable and intact for the future is a big question. Although council is at least aware and is looking at the problem, it is probably too late to stop the rot of an imminent Leura shopkeeper exodus. Leura is actually bleeding to death.”

Leura overtourism is not unique.  The influx of tourist hordes are invading and destroying national icons, villages and historical sites globally.  It starts with low cost airlines and low-cost bus tours like Grayline’s daily double decker 68-seat capacity rushed tour to the Blue Mountains are the current trend to exacerbate overtourism to Leura.

Leura is not designed for, nor benefits from, bus tour toilet stops.