Passengers 'use houses as a toilet'

Published on Friday 31 July 2009 10:02

SLEEPLESS city centre residents say their lives have been "blighted" by noisy revellers shouting, screaming and using the outside of their homes as a toilet while waiting for night buses.

Residents of Leopold Place and Blenheim Place on London Road say drunk people waiting at the nearby bus stop have urinated on the walls of their homes so often that they are permanently stained – and have even defecated outside them.

They say the noise is so bad they are unable to use the bedrooms at the front of their homes.

They have lobbied for Lothian Buses to remove the stop from the night bus network, and say an existing night bus stop close to John Lewis is sufficient for late-night passengers in the area.

The firm has refused, however, saying the stop is a popular interchange between bus routes and that closing it to night services could see passengers run into the road to try to flag down buses.

A spokeswoman for the Greenside Residents' Association said: "There's vomit, there's food waste every day thrown over the railings. Some people have had the doors to their close broken into.

"One man found that someone had defecated in his close and one resident's stonework has been permanently stained with urine.

"It's happened so often that it's seeped into the sandstone and she can't get it out.

"The noise is horrific. People can't even sleep in the rooms at the front of the house. Their lives are blighted."

One resident, business development director Lilias Thain, 47, said: "Just last week I was just getting ready for bed and heard the gate open. I went and opened the door and there was a female squatting on the doorstep."

Their case has been taken up by Edinburgh North and Leith MSP Malcolm Chisholm, who said: "I think it would be possible just to move the night bus without moving the day buses from the stop."

In a letter to the MSP, Lothian Buses managing director Ian Craig said: "I think it is inevitable that intending passengers at night would continue to congregate there for night buses.

"This would create a serious potential safety risk, in that a driver on a night bus attempting to continue past this stop without stopping would risk encountering considerable numbers of people spilling on to the road attempting to stop the bus."

A spokeswoman for the company said: "In no way do we condone antisocial behaviour but this stop fulfils a very important transport need for a substantial number of passengers – the vast amount of them conduct themselves in an orderly fashion."

A city council spokesman said: "We are working with the police to explore options for tackling antisocial behaviour in the area."