TR SNIPPET - 24 HOUR RESIDENTIAL BUS PASSES

I am a more than a bit weary of this issue.

It never affects me personally because I get the longer senior discounted passes.

And it causes such a huge bit of dissension that I hate to bring it up again.

However, conversations about it this past trip make me feel it necessary to revisit it and to change my hard line position as well.

Here is the issue: a 24 hour pass purchased on a strip bus is $8. The only long term passes are 3 day passes for $20 which save $4. There is no senior reduced option at all.

A 24 hour pass on a residential bus, like the WAX as you board is just $5. With senior reduction it is just $2.50.

Locals with local ID can ride the strip buses with that residential pass. Others technicality cannot.

So, here the practical question has been whether any driver ever asks for a local ID and if not having one incurs any penalty. They do ask for the senior citizen photo ID, but that does not indicate where we live, just that we are approved for senior rate. Medicare cards will work as well, but the ID can be issued at the BTC where they take our photos as early as 60 and before Medicare kicks in.

Many of my board friends have time and again used a 24 hour residential pass on the strip bus and not been questioned by anyone.

However, I have been slow to recommend intentionally breaking those clear rules of the bus company. Experienced others do recomment it.

This past trip I met a well educated woman, perhaps a lawyer, at a poker table who claimed to know that it is technically illegal for the bus company to deny access to strip buses once they have sold the all access pass on a residential bus to anyone, and she could back it up with some references, but frankly the language was lawyer language and well beyond what I wanted to read on her smart phone after midnight and a few red wines.

Also, it is ludicrous to think that any bus rider is going to go to court over this even if she is right about the law.

However, she said that the bus company knew they were not in accordance with law, but just bullied folks with that rule.

This also suggests that were the local ID regulation enforced, the worst it would mean would be the customer being asked to leave the bus. If this woman's analysis is correct, then the bus company would never fine us for having a residential 24 hour pass and boarding a strip bus. At worst, the penalty would be being asked to leave the bus. All the people I talked to agreed with her analysis. I have never read or met a person who was asked to leave a bus with a residential pass because they were not local.

In fact, she said the bus company had gotten themselves into an expensive mess just trying to put inspectors on all the express buses to check for passes. So many locals rode the bus for free. It was a bad mistake.

And we do notice that only the SDX buses still have that hop on hop off wait to be asked for a pass procedure. The Sahara and Boulder highway buses went back to boarding only at the front where the driver determines if we are correctly ticketed.

Up until now I've been advising folks who want to use a strip bus after buying a 24 hour residential pass to only use the Deuce and perhaps not there at MGM with luggage as a clear tip off that you are a tourist.

That way if you made it past the driver and boarded, you would be all set to ride. No inspector would come aboard and ask you to leave the bus in some seedy area between the strip and downtown.

I talked to three bus company employees and two of them when I pressed them, told me that drivers do not ask for local ID. They warned me to have my RTC senior ID ready, but that it was the most I would be asked to show.

In quite a few years of writing about buses, I have yet to hear of one person being hassled about being a local or not when using a 24 hour residential pass on a strip bus.

I am still not recommending breaking the bus law, but where I previously compared it to jaywalking, where somewhere down the line a huge fine might be applied, I now think it is a minor rule breakage and that the buses can't even prosecute all the street folks who board SDX buses with no pass whatsoever, let alone be concerned with those not in compliance with this technicality.

I welcome input.

I'd especially like to hear from anyone who tried to use a senior reduced rate 24 hour residential pass on a strip bus and was asked for a local ID.

But a good part of me is also so weary of this issue.

The real issue is for the bus company to get their practices in line with law and spell them out clearly.

We know they don't do that because they fail to put the asterisk on the 15 day passes on the website to indicate that those 15 day passes are all access, but any RTC person will tell us that officially they are all access and I've had that checked by seven independent people from all over the world asking this same question at the BTC. No issue on that pass.

And the bus company might think about their whole intent to fleece the tourist when providing bus service.

It leaves a sour taste in the mouth when senior rates are applied to only local buses and when senior reduced rate passes are sold primarily where tourists can't easy buy them.

By the way, the easiest way to quickly get a 15 or 30 day bus pass was to go downtown on the WAX and visit the Walgreen's there.

However, there is a 24 hour Walgreen's just a block from the Orleans on Tropicana, so starting a trip at the Orleans is just as easy as starting it downtown, except that it take two buses to get to the Orleans from the airport.

I did it this past trip and I loved it.

So there it is.