By John Francis
It was a running joke in south Florida in the 1960s that all tourists should have a button installed on their backs. Any local resident could push the button and a $5 bill would come out of a slot, like a subway transfer machine. It was a cute joke. The point of it, other than the absurdity, was that ordinary Floridians didn’t get much from tourists other than pushed out of the way at their favourite places.
Sixty years later, south Florida’s problem has spread around the world. The word “overtourism”, according to Wikipedia, was “used infrequently before 2017”. It sure gets used a lot now. It would appear that once coined, the term found resonance around the world.
Oxford Dictionary named overtourism as one of its “Words of the Year” for 2018.
In 2019 I went to Europe for the first time and made a point of going to some of the places that were having problems with too many tourists. I went to Barcelona, Venice, Florence, Cinque Terre and London.
Venice was (is) the poster boy for overtourism — 30 million visitors per year to a city with a population that had dropped to barely 50,000 (the population has dropped further since then). That’s 600 visitors per resident per year and that was widely thought to be the heaviest in the world.
But you can slice and dice those numbers different ways. On any given day, the numbers rarely exceed 250,000, which is around five visitors per resident.
Would Tobermory or Lion’s Head ever see five visitors per resident? What would that look like? Tourism at Tobermory is spread widely across the former St Edmunds Township, which extends down to Johnston Harbour and Crane Lake. The population of that area is about 1,400, so 5X would be 7,000 visitors. Tourism at Lion’s Head is concentrated in the actual village, between Ferndale Road and Everatt Sideroad, which has a population of around 500. So 5X would be 2,500 visitors. Are there ever that many visitors? About 60 times per summer in Tobermory, I’d guess, and maybe ten or fifteen times in Lion’s Head?
But you could slice it another way. In terms of space, Venice is only about five times the size of Lion’s Head. Imagine a quarter of a million people visiting every day in a space five times the size of Lion’s Head. So when you bring space into it, Venice looks much harder hit than we are.
Venice also doesn’t have anything remotely like Peacock’s or Hellyer’s. Not even the smaller, 2019 versions of Peacock’s and Hellyer’s. Just souvenir shops, jewelry stores and trattorias.
Venice doesn’t feel like a community anymore. The biggest problem in Venice is daytrippers. They spend less than other visitors but they crowd out the locals and the hotel guests.
DIGRESSION: the other problem in Venice is that housing is so expensive the workers can’t afford to live there.
Our municipality has made a bunch of changes in recent years to try to manage the crowds. Mostly, they’ve worked.
Too many people parking on Moore Street? The municipality banned parking on Moore Street and after a couple of years of give and take, the problem is pretty much gone.
Too many visitors parking in downtown Lion’s Head so that the regular customers can’t find a place to park? Make it all paid parking! Oops! That turned out to be even worse. Change it so that it’s two-hour free parking in front of the stores? Problem solved.
Too many people going to Little Cove? Make a small parking lot and ban parking everywhere else. The crowding was driven by TikTok and Instagram so it took a couple of years for those posts to slide down the popularity chart, but basically: problem solved.
Hundreds of people at Mermaid’s Cove? Hundreds of cars parked on Grant Watson Drive, blocking driveways, sometimes blocking the road? Worked on Moore Street, let’s zone the whole road no parking. Oops. Residents want to park there, so put in a 6 car “residents only” parking lot. Problem solved. I walk to Mermaid’s a couple of times a week; it’s always lovely. There are rarely more than a dozen people there.
It’s interesting to consider — in a year in which tourism is widely thought to have dwindled slightly — what it feels like to live in our communities.
This is the busiest month of the year. So look around. Do you like what you see? Can you live with the numbers of visitors you’re seeing? What are the problems? What works? What doesn’t?
Write it down; make notes, take pictures. If your memory’s anything like mine, it’s the only way you’ll have anything that you’re sure of when the question comes up next winter. And it will.
The municipality has tried hard to accommodate businesses, promote tourism and address residents’ complaints and I’m sure they will continue to do so. We just need to give them accurate information to work from.
DIGRESSION: If only we could think of a way to promote affordable housing so that the people who want to work here can afford to live here…
