Public access & transport

Development of lighthouses, railways, bridges and roads helped increase the tourism flow to coastal areas of NSW. In the colonial times, shipping was initially the dominant mode of travel along the coast. Ports grew up in coastal communities that shipped cedar, coal, blue metal, dairy products or livestock. Harbour improvement projects at Newcastle, Wollongong and Kiama helped make shipping safer and more efficient. Lighthouses were erected at Wollongong, Newcastle, Kiama, Ulladulla and Norah Head to improve the safety of shipping. From the nineteenth century, beaches and baths at Manly were easily reached from Central Sydney via the Manly ferry and trams transported thousands of daytrippers to Bondi and Coogee.

The coming of the railways offered a safer and more efficient form of transport than coastal shipping. Within Sydney and Newcastle trains, trams and later buses enabled people without private transport to travel to ocean baths. Cronulla remains the only Sydney beach readily accessible by train.

The routes chosen for the railway influenced the development of coastal communities and coastal tourism. Travel into the NSW Central Coast improved after 1889 with the opening of the Hawkesbury Railway Bridge, the last link in the rail connection between the colonial capital cities of South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. The rail line from Sydney north to Newcastle did not run along the coast, instead it ran inland to the west of the Tuggerah Lakes and Lake Macquarie. Rail lines also linked Newcastle to the towns of the upper Hunter Valley.

South of Sydney, rail lines ran beyond the Australia's oldest National Park south through the strip of mining communities between the sea and the escarpment north of Wollongong. Extending further south, the railway destroyed the shipping trade in Shellharbour and Gerringong by the 1890s. The south coast railway ended at Bomaderry on the north bank of the Shoalhaven River, leaving the communities further south along the coast reliant on coastal shipping and road transport and constrained by a lack of bridges across rivers such as the Clyde.

Water traffic down rivers and across lakes was important for tourism, even in the railway age. Holiday-makers at the Entrance took a train from Sydney to Wyong and then a boat across the Tuggerah Lakes. Coastal steamers continued to land passengers and cargo at Gosford in the 1920s, but by the 1930s, the Illawarra Steam Navigation Company only carried freight and not passengers between Sydney and Bermagui.

After the 1920s, cars were more common and greater attention was given to developing and improving a road network. By 1928, there was a new direct Sydney-Newcastle main road, but the Central Coast remained remote from rail and poorly served by roads.

Within the coastal communities, ocean baths were often within walking distance of homes and holiday accommodation. Camping on private land and the development of camping grounds gave even more people easy access to ocean baths. Pool patrons in Wollongong still needed hitching posts for their horses in the early twentieth century.

During WWII, vessels from the coastal shipping lines were commandeered for war use. After WWII, coastal shipping failed to revive along the NSW coast and there was little further development of railways. Road transport became the dominant mode of travel in NSW.

From the 1960s, tourists travelled from Canberra to the NSW South Coast via roads over the Clyde Mountain and Brown Mountain.

In the 1980s, the extension of the Sydney to Newcastle freeway and electrification of the Gosford–Newcastle railway made it easier to commute from the Central Coast to Sydney. The main Sydney to Brisbane highway and train line still run inland ,west of the Tuggerah Lakes and Lake Macquarie. The south coast railway line still ends at Bomaderry and is electrified only between Sydney and Kiama.

Most international tourists now arrive in Australia by plane rather than by ship, but cruise liners continue to call at Sydney.

Some ocean baths are now easily accessed from bus stops, railway stations, carparks, walking tracks and bike baths, but falling rocks, slippery surfaces, and waves can make it difficult even for able-bodied local people to access certain ocean baths. Access difficulties for people, vehicles and other machinery make it harder to maintain some ocean baths.

Access to little used baths is rarely convenient. A special lift was reportedly once provided access to Clifton's bath at the foot of steep cliffs.

Newcastle's Bathers Way, the Eastern Suburbs Coastal Walk, Cronulla's Esplanade and Wollongong's bikeways link sets of ocean baths.

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