perf(site): Lighten pages and fix Go's directions and fares

[WillieCubed]

TL;DR

The Go page's step-by-step directions now say only what RTC itself publishes, the bus stop data is
confirmed current and documented, and every page's first visit on a phone is lighter: the home page
drops from 208 KB to 107 KB, and every other page is under the 100 KB budget. Lighthouse on a phone
now finds nothing to fix on any main page.

Overview of Changes

Why this exists

Week Without Driving starts October 1, and most visitors will open lvwwd.org on a phone, often on
the bus, with little data or a weak signal. Two things had to be true before then: the directions
on the Go page had to be right, because a wrong stop or fare strands someone, and the pages had to
be light enough to open on a weak connection.

Places to go says only what RTC says

The seven destinations under "Places to go" were written from RTC's August feed and from notes about
the Raiders' Game Day Express. Every route number and stop name was checked again on September 23
against the GTFS feed RTC serves today, and the Game Day Express details and the "BHX-A" label
against rtcsnv.com. Most of it held. What did not:

• Several routes pass through Bonneville Transit Center rather than ending there, so the Downtown
  step now says "any route that stops at" it, and lists every route RTC's own map shows there.
• The Downtown step no longer says the Deuce has its own fare. Every RTC pass works on the Deuce;
  only a single ride bought on it costs more, so the step says the Deuce "can cost more" and links
  to the fare guide.
• The Game Day Express costs $4 round trip, with cash taken on board, not $2 each way. For the 1:25
  pm kickoff on October 4, buses run from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm, not from 9:30. M Resort is RTC's
  "West Henderson" stop. RTC does not publish how often the buses leave, so that line is gone.
• The Craig Ranch Regional Park map buttons pointed about 300 meters north of the park point the
  rest of the site uses. They now match.

The destinations and the finder's seven places now live in one module that the page and the tests
share, with a note of when and where each fact was checked. The steps' links to the fare and heat
guides render as ordinary links instead of injected HTML.

Under each stop in "Find a bus", commas and color squares no longer float away from route names
when the list wraps.

The fare guide says every pass works on the Deuce

"Pay your bus fare" told riders the Deuce has its own higher-priced pass and that it is the one to
buy for a trip on the Strip. RTC's fares page says every pass is valid on every route; the higher
Strip fares are what visitors pay. The guide now says that any RTC pass works on every route,
including the Deuce, and that only a single ride bought on the Deuce costs more. It also gives the
fares RTC lists for residential routes, checked on September 23: $2 for a single ride, $3 for 2
hours, $5 for 24 hours, and $20, $34 and $65 for 7, 15 and 30 days, with exact change for cash.

The stop data is current and documented

RTC's feed is still version "August 2026_20260730", valid until August 2027, and the rebuilt stop
data matches it stop for stop. Each of the seven finder places was checked on lvwwd.org: every
point sits at the place it names, and each shows its expected first stop and five stops within a
mile. A new how-to, docs/operations/how-to/update-stop-data.md, records that check and says how
to refresh the data with pnpm stops before next year's week. The data is now written compact,
which saves a phone about 9 KB the first time someone searches.

Lighter first visits on phones

The home page's photo was the biggest cost: phones downloaded a 113 KB, 1,200-pixel photo and then
showed only its middle, because the hero is a tall frame. Phones held upright now get just that
middle as its own AVIF image, 32 KB, with the same framing and about the same sharpness. Every
other photo also comes in AVIF, with WebP as the fallback, and in more sizes so phones can pick a
closer fit.

Fonts were the other cost on every page, about 45 KB. Each font is now split so a page downloads
only the plain English letters and punctuation the site uses; accented letters load only on a page
that shows one. Public Sans, which never actually showed but was saved for offline use on every
phone, is removed. Nothing looks different; screenshots of the home page on four phone sizes and a
laptop match before and after.

First visit on a Galaxy A15-sized phone, as Chrome's developer tools count it (which includes the
response headers of every file):

Page	Before	After
Home	208.5 KB	106.8 KB
Take part	102.7 KB	76.6 KB
Giveaway	143.6 KB	98.0 KB
Bingo	90.8 KB	75.8 KB
My week	83.4 KB	68.4 KB
Go	78.6 KB	63.5 KB
Sign up	76.6 KB	61.4 KB
Partners	75.1 KB	59.9 KB
A rider guide	73.5 KB	58.3 KB

The home page is the one page still over 100 KB by that count. Its files themselves are 99 KB; the
rest is headers. Getting further without changing how it looks would mean cutting the shared
stylesheet or the photos below the fold, which is left for later. The offline copy each phone saves
in the background also shrank, from 256 KB to 225 KB, and still holds every rider guide, Go with
its stop data, and Bingo.

What Lighthouse and the accessibility check found

Lighthouse on a phone scored every main page 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO on the
preview, apart from My week, which asks search engines not to list it on purpose. Along the way it
and an axe check of every page in both color modes found four real problems, now fixed: faint
numbers in the Bingo card's corners, banner previews on Partners that turned dark-on-dark in dark
mode, an embed code block on Partners that a keyboard could not scroll, and a sitemap that listed
pages marked not to be indexed.

Before this reaches lvwwd.org

The deploy workflow has been failing on main because the production environment has no Cloudflare
deploy token, so merging does not update lvwwd.org. A maintainer needs to run
pnpm bootstrap --production, or deploy by hand, for these changes to go live.

On lvwwd.org itself, Lighthouse's best-practices score is 92, because Cloudflare injects its Web
Analytics script into every page and the Content Security Policy blocks it. The analytics pull
request allows that script; until it lands, turning off automatic Web Analytics setup for the zone
in the Cloudflare dashboard clears the error.

Follow-ups

• Someone checks the Game Day Express page again in the week before October 4, in case RTC changes
  the schedule.
• The home page gets under 100 KB with its headers counted, by trimming unused shared styles.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code