Is it loitering to read a novel on a bus all day if you also have a monthly unlimited bus pass?

Unless there’s a rule against it, I think it’s allowed to sit on the bus reading all day, if you have an unlimited bus pass. Riding the bus for fun and exploration is also allowed with a pass.

It’s a common survival strategy of homeless people to take long bus trips for heat in cold areas. Some bus systems might have rules against sleeping on the bus or otherwise annoying other passengers, but reading doesn’t tend to bother most other people at all.

But I’d suggest a nice library instead. Personally, I tend to get motion sick when I read too much in a moving vehicle.

Without reading the Terms of Carriage for passenger-carrying vehicles in your province, it is impossible to know whether you can get away with it or not. There may well be some limitations on your “unlimited pass”. For one thing, the regulations may say that the system is for transportation (only), but not for taking up a seat indefinitely.

There may be rules about disembarkation at the end of the line. There may be rules about the numbers of trips per day or per week. Even though the pass may be labelled “unlimited”, my guess is that the transit company doesn’t mean that you can take up residency.

The other factor to consider: if you’re sitting their semi-permanently with your book, are you denying other paying passengers a place to sit? Especially at rush hours.

On the other hand if it gets you out of the house and off the internet for a while, it may not be a bad thing.

@elbanditoroso Your cynical answer prompted me to read the entire Red Deer transit web site looking for any sort of policy, but their site doesn’t seem to have any detail about that, though we could phone them up and ask when they’re open.

I did notice that they have a Books on the Bus program where they have books available for reading on the bus or to take away and read wherever, so I strongly suspect that they are not liable to crack down on a fellow’s diabolical plan to cruelly read books and so selfishly steal first choice of seating from other paying customers by using more than you think is reasonable via their “Unlimited” pass (which I found no information about other than price and where you can buy it).

As long as there is seating available for other passengers, I don’t see any legal issues. If a lot of people did t this to the extent that they filled the bus and kept others from being able to get on, then there would be a problem. If there is no current law preventing this from happening then a new law would be created or, more likely, restrictions would be placed on the bus pass.

(I like how one guy in Red Deer, Alberta (where BTW the bus company’s main publicity program is “Books on the Bus”) asks if he can hang out on a bus reading, and multiple people suggest that maybe there would be a legal issue where readers are depriving other passengers of seats.)

You apparently missed the part of the question that said that he spent the entire day reading on the bus; I seriously doubt that the bus company’s book program was intended to turn buses into mobile libraries. One person using a monthly pass to go round in circles on the bus all day long can be ignored, but if everyone did it there would be problems.

@LostInParadise I still don’t see that exactly. Quote it for me. He was asking if there was an issue.

Not that that matters, because guess what? In real life, there is no real issue with it. You get on a bus and pay the fare and ride the bus and don’t annoy anyone, even if you choose to spend all day or all month riding buses with an unlimited pass, guess what happens, even if you’re the one in the back when through some freak of nature a Red Deer Transit bus fills beyond standing room capacity? No one has any idea, or any ability to know or the right to care that one of the passengers rides the bus a lot on his unlimited pass.

And who asked about if everyone in a Red Deer decides to spend all their time riding buses? What sick demented hell universe of misplaced projected shame does your imagination dwell in, that it conjures that idea when someone asks if they can hang out reading a book on a bus if they feel like?

Put the pieces together. He was not in school. The only thing that he mentions doing was reading on the bus. That covers a good part of the day. He also mentioned that the transit authority did not mind. Why even mention them if he was not spending a considerable amount of time riding the buses? As to whether we would have a “demented hell universe” if we all thought the way RDG does, I will leave for you to decide.

@LostInParadise Even if one guy spends all day, every day, riding a bus in Red Deer (population about 100,000, no nearby major communities) which I suspect is a place without buses that fill to capacity (or if one did, that RDG would probably relent or get on another bus at that point), I don’t think it’s ever going to be depriving anyone of seats.