Today I pranked people who surf my T-Comm site every day looking for “special sightings” of buses that are assigned to routes which they normally aren’t assigned. I swapped buses around such as putting articulated (long) buses on regular routes, changing the types of buses on particular routes, etc. It turns out that what caught more attention was the fact that my ‘backup’ buses in the D40LF and LFS range were being randomly assigned as cover for buses that were already swapped, rather than the actual swaps that I had intended.
Here are some screenshots of some of the swapped buses:
Some technical detail went into planning this since it was critical to also keep a copy of the actual bus assignments so that it could be replaced after April Fools. I came up of a short list of routes and buses to swap that wouldn’t completely break the rest of the system or make it completely obvious that the data was faked. Then I created a separate copy of T-Comm on Sunday night and took a couple of hours to code the swapping modification. Monday was the test day, which turned out to be very useful because there were a couple glaring bugs. Then overnight I swapped the two T-Comms and went to sleep. By the time I woke up, I already had messages of confusion in my inbox 🙂 Was it worth the effort? Yeah I think so. Lesson behind this? There’s nothing like transit-fanning the traditional way of sighting buses in person.
