LAS VEGAS, NV — Earlier this year the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada (RTC) and Marksman Security initiated a campaign to ensure that transit riders were not sleeping on busses. The effort typically involves 4-6 security officers boarding the bus and one yelling out that “This is a no sleeping zone.” I’ve been riding the bus under the RTC since the beginning (30 years), and to see that many security guards board at once is alarming. If someone is caught sleeping, a picture is taken of them with a phone and they are woken up, informed that they cannot sleep on the bus and if it continues, they’ll be asked to depart. Who does this effect? A person on their way to work, from work, or a late night out might doze off but most people that sleep on the bus are the homeless.
Las Vegas may be known for its triple digit heat, but other conditions such as aggressive winds and desert cold are very real, and the homeless are on the front lines of it. The bus can be a shelter on wheels and often the best (if not only) place for the homeless to get some sleep without worrying about exposure, being robbed, or harmed. Last year there were at least 240 homeless deaths.
It’s telling that shelters, jails, and mental hospitals give out an abundance of bus passes, and then the priority for the RTC and Marksman Security is to make sure people aren’t sleeping on the bus. It’s indicative of the way cities deal with homelessness. Shuffling them from one point to another. Like a game of shells, progress is sleight of hand, movement distracts from loss.
Consider this: the RTC and Marksman Security will not remove a passenger for refusing to give up their seat in an area designated for the elderly, pregnant, or disabled where one boards. Yet you can be removed for sleeping. Numerous times I have seen a bus pull up to a stop where a person is waiting in a wheelchair only to be told they’ll have to wait for the next bus because a passenger will not move from the area where a wheelchair can go.
Despite a double digit billion dollar a year sleep aid industry, we are still deprived, we believe sleep is unproductive, we shame sleep, we punish sleep.
Andrew Romanelli was born and raised in Las Vegas through numerous implosions and expansive growth. He has lived in many of its historic areas and currently resides downtown. He is a product of the Family Court system, Special Education, and Montevista Hospital. Obtaining his GED at 16 (the year they lowered the age) and over a decade later his BA in English at Nevada State. His first job was through local 226 at the Showboat as a graveyard bus boy when he was a teenager. Since then, he has held (and lost) a vast array of jobs and currently works for a local printer as a guy who does whatever is needed. He is an activist for the disenfranchised, a teaching artist through Poetry Promise and a proud Wobblie. He is a John Oliver Simon award recipient among other recognitions, and his first poetry collection Rotgut was published by Zeitgeist Press in 2022.
