There’s a reason why people are supposed to stay on the Strip when they go to Las Vegas, and it’s not just proximity to the best attractions.
This city of fluorescent lights and gambling halls extends in all directions across the Nevada landscape, for as far as the eye can see. Even when viewing it from the Strat tower, over 100 stories high, it is clear that outside of the heart of the city and massive multi-storey casino resorts bigger than my entire hometown, this is a city that has stretched outwards as much as it’s grown upwards, carpeting the desert with houses and hotels and RV parks in between its grid-like streets.
That carpet is not the Vegas that most people visiting here walk upon. But most people also aren’t attending a 60,000 person music festival that caused massive spikes to the weekend rate of on-the-Strip hotels while booking an overseas holiday with very little money and zero familiarity with Vegas. And the people who do find cheaper places off the strip probably don’t pick their accomodation based on the name of a 20-year-old The Killers album, and instead are sensible and choose something close to all the Strip has to offer. Or at least in the downtown section of the city just a short bus trip away from the tourist-trapping row of massive, massive casinos and the fancy structures and statues and dazzling lights they’ve hung up to lure people in.
Not me. I selected a hotel halfway to Boulder, at least one hour by bus (and usually closer to three) from the Strip and requiring multiple connections to get wherever I wanted to go.
People sometimes say they want to live like a local when they go on holiday, but I suspect that’s not really true. I stayed at Sam’s Town, the first Vegas resort “for locals”, and I’d say as much as I could during a one week stay, that’s the experience I received. At one point, it left me choking back tears at 2am due to the sheer amount of abject poverty that surrounds and supports this City of Sin — or should I say City of Scams, as it is now not just a gambling den but also timeshare central (though that’s a story for another time).
The bus that services the Strip is called the Deuce, and this is the crowded double-decker that tourists take to get from Strip casino to Strip casino along the very long road they came to Vegas to experience. On the bus, tourists may note with interest an unusual sight even for America: the occasional transit security person will pop in, stand at the front with the driver for a stop or two (not weird — every bus has people standing on it here) before hopping off again.
I expect that anyone observing this will think little of it except to perhaps wonder why it’s needed, or ponder how much safer they feel as a visitor having roaming security personnel about, especially considering the many homeless people that start dotting the streets in the late evening, tucking in to sleep the night through with cardboard signs out that read ‘Any little helps’ and ‘Down on my luck’.
But this small snippet of poverty you may catch sight of on the Strip is nothing compared to the reality of the rest of the city.
The interiors of the busses of Las Vegas are covered in some very specific signs, so many signs with so many rules that even with my long 2-hour ride into the city, it took several days to read all of them. Some were clear pushes for accessibility — I learnt reading one that if I were a disabled passenger slow to board the bus, by law the bus driver was not allowed to mock me to other passengers.
Others were a bit more mysterious but would reveal their reasons to me over the week I was here. All were heavy with environmental storytelling — PSAs that give you just a little bit too much info about a hypothetical situation for it to really be hypothetical. Indeed, as I was clinging to bars and straps and whatever handholds I could find while we lurched from stop to stop, I did begin to wonder if these bus drivers got bonuses for finishing their routes on time; they made it very clear speed was of the essence. Not that their erratic driving made the busses actually arrive on time. But I could see why the many clearly-spelled-out “rights” regarding ramps and drivers taking the time to strap wheelchairs in before taking off might be needed here.
The people of Las Vegas are lovely. Even the ones who are quite clearly dealing with their own problems and the grumpy people bothered by the desert heat mostly do their best to keep to themselves. My favourite people I encountered were the woman who told me she was “glad I was sitting down now” after I’d been standing for a time letting others take the free seats, and the magician man who described his big box of tricks as “bringing his own chair”. Most people were quick to offer help; directions were given cheerfully and often strangers would yell “Back door!” to let an unaware driver know someone needed off. And for the drivers themselves, frequently the machine that scanned my card didn’t work and I was waved on by an impatient bus driver (who gave the strong impression they would rather people not pay their fare than take more than five seconds to board). They would also often wave on people without the money to pay, too — though not always.
But there was a real community spirit here that I hadn’t felt on transport in LA or back home in Christchurch.
The later it gets in Vegas, the more the bus becomes populated by tired and increasingly-dishevelled passengers. By 2am, the time I usually bussed home after a day at the festival or on the Strip, there are two types of people boarding: those coming home from late-night shifts, and those whose clothes and appearance made it obvious they would be one of many people that evening who may not have the money for the fare.
Sometimes — often — this latter group had their heads tucked under blankets as they tried to catch some sleep — fine while they were waiting at the stop, but not allowed on the busses, as I would learn when transit security boarded to rap loudly on the windows next to anyone they caught taking a nap. When an American man questioned this, an officer described it as “for our safety”. The passenger pointed out this is the only city he’s been in where, after paying your fare, you’re not allowed to have a little snooze on your way home.
Not that I’m sure all of these people had a home to go to.
I can easily believe it’s for people‘s safety that they do this — especially for the safety of drivers who might otherwise have to wake people at transit centers who aren’t all that keen to disembark. In fact, there were multiple times when a loud aggressive passenger mouthing off from the back rows made me wish transit security had stuck around just few more stops. But usually the aggression seemed more directed towards drivers than other passengers. After all, they were the people with the power to decide whether or not people with no money could get home, and who drove past me twice in just the short time I was here (one time at 1am and at the other in the full heat of the desert sun), and who were often late to stops, and who frequently seemed aggravated and somewhat hostile themselves.
But the aggression from passengers always became notably more muted when security were present, or had been present recently.
The many, many drivers who did let people on without fares were offering a common kindness that probably made a huge difference to an unfortunate soul’s day and yet still changed nothing about their overall situation.
These kindnesses I witnessed and experienced, I strove to pass on myself. At a stop, I helped a man (who assured me he wasn’t trying to steal my phone) work out which of his cards were registered because his phone had died (the one that was working had zero dollars on it) and then I attempted to charge his phone with my battery pack (it didn’t work — the phone looked pretty damaged). He was fortunately waved on by the driver that picked us up. I paid a kid’s fare at 2am when a driver wouldn’t let them on. I distributed day-long bus tickets given to me by a lovely touristing couple after they boarded the Deuce, as they wouldn’t expire until the next morning and they “wanted them to be put to use”. Having taken several late-night busses at this point and watched multiple people with broken cards or no money be either waved on or sent away depending on the driver and their mood, I leapt at the chance to take them, promising to hand them out to people who needed them. One of them was given away immediately upon disembarking to a disabled woman with a walker and the shakes. She nearly started crying as she told me she “just had to get out of this city”, actually did start crying as I gave her the ticket, and who I left still without any money for the Greyhound bus for her to get out of town. But I at least got her to the station.
I describe these experiences to show you the evidence that I used to form my own conclusions about busses, security and poverty: I caught many during my time in America and yet the only place I saw transit security was in Vegas. The uniformed people patrolling the busses were just so obviously a symptom of a much greater problem that couldn’t actually be solved without addressing the problem inherent to Vegas itself, and that’s that it’s a city preying upon the impoverished by rich people and corporations who pay small wages only to suck them back up through the pokies and casinos that are overwhelmingly present here.
I saw many con-artists on the streets during my time here, including an insistent “Buddhist monk” with very little English asking for money “for peace” as he placed a bracelet and necklace on me despite my resistance, and who I eventually had to evade by leading him into a casino and towards security. (They kicked him out; he made me give the necklace and bracelet back.) But nothing was as big a con as the large hotel conglomerations pulling people in with dazzling displays, massive artworks, fluorescent lights and cheap hotel rooms to sell them chances of winning wealth and literal timeshare scams.
I’d honestly rather give my money to the monk. At least he put on a good performance.
Today someone died on an Auckland bus. It is only one of series of assaults that have happened on transit and at stops in New Zealand recently. It is not the first death we have had.
Despite assurances from officials, this is a problem that seems to be getting worse and not better, and is a signal that we probably need to start investing in safety in the same way this US city has been forced to in order to keep their streets safe and appealing for the tourists they’re attracting.
But it’s a sign of something else, something hiring security guards won’t improve. The poverty, the social ills and division, the drug addiction and illness and aggression and negativity that grinds people into the dust and turns them into someone capable of doing something like that — that comes from us. And that’s something that will only get worse while New Zealand refuses to correct our course.
When I go home tomorrow, I’ll be stopping for a day in Auckland to catch up with an old friend. I’ll be bussing to her house. And right now, American busses feel a lot safer than Auckland busses. That’s incredibly alarming because American busses don’t feel that safe at all, even with (and perhaps because of) patrolling transit security. But if you’ve been paying attention, and if you recognise the cause and effect nature of our social problems, then like me, this outcome won’t surprise you in the slightest.
A final thought: busses here in Vegas are a certain sign of class. “Local” visitors to Vegas who stay off-Strip also don’t witness and experience the sheer amount of poverty present because they have cars. Like in New Zealand, most people who take the bus do so because they lack alternative transport and it’s usually because they’re poor, which is why it’s so heartbreaking to see someone unable to afford a not-all-that-expensive fare.
There’s no rush to fix the root cause of these problems when you aren’t the one feeling the effects. Politicians and fat-cat capitalists are perfectly happy to paper over the cracks in society so long as they have cars to take them from A to B, and that’s what any transit-based solution will be, even if it’s very effective at enforcing security: papering over the problems to placate the populace.
But still, for now, I think we may need it.