Los Gatos has a transit network drawn for a different town. Some stops see almost no riders because they do not connect anywhere people are going. Meanwhile roughly 13,000 residents live in districts with no fixed-route service at all.
We ran the federally prescribed cost-benefit analysis. Even the current network, flawed as it is, already returns $1.71 in benefits for every $1 spent over 20 years. A redesigned network is projected to do meaningfully better.
Here is the problem in one figure. The westbound bus at Main & Pleasant, the closest stop to Los Gatos High School, is scheduled to arrive before the first bell. In practice it shows up right as the bell rings, so a student who relies on it is already late.
A bus that lands students at the bell is a bus they cannot take. This single timing gap is why so many families drive instead, and it is the gap a bell-aligned schedule would close.
Public transit gets cut whenever ridership numbers drop, and ridership drops whenever the buses do not go where people need to go. It is a feedback loop that ends with the empty stops you can already see around town.
The federal government has already done the hard work of figuring out how to value transit honestly. Travel-time savings, crash reduction, fewer emissions, health benefits from walking to stops, the option value to people who do not ride today but might tomorrow, all of it has a defined methodology under FTA cost-benefit guidelines and USDOT BCA Guidance 2024.
So we ran the numbers, for the existing network and for a redesigned Route 27 with stops where the demand actually is.
This is a public-interest analysis, not a paid advocacy document. Every number links back to its federal source. The pipeline that produces every chart and table is open source, and corrections are applied in public.
The analysis intentionally uses a conservative scope: property value uplift near stops, wider agglomeration effects, and school-access value are excluded from the baseline scenario. The $1.71 BCR holds even without those items.
Three pieces of work, each with the data and methodology open for inspection.
16 districts, 8 federally recognized benefit categories, 20-year present value at OMB-prescribed discount rates, peer-benchmarked against VTA and California operators. This is where the $1.71-per-$1 figure comes from.
Open the full analysis
LiveThree coordinated asks for VTA: a universal LGHS student/staff pass, a bell-aligned AM/PM timetable, and real signage at school-adjacent stops. Backed by the ranked stops map, the methods we ran end-to-end, and the per-stop ridership ranking.
Open the route-redesign work
ReferenceEvery acronym and agency cited in this project, defined in plain language with links to primary sources. Hover any underlined term in the analysis pages for an instant definition.
Browse the glossary
16 districts mapped and costed. 8 benefit categories quantified. BCR and NPV computed at all three OMB discount rates. Route 27 BCR = 1.71; universal LGHS pass BCR = 4.51.
Clarke-Wright + OpenTripPlanner + custom Python scorer applied to every Route 27 stop. 3 confirmed removes and ~6 consolidation candidates. Ridership calibrated to within +0.5% of the audited VTA Title VI baseline.
Bell-aligned AM/PM timetable (D1), ranked stop-removal table (D2), reliability-gain BCR (D3), and signage gap inventory (D4) being packaged for a low-pressure Commissioner input session. Stop list not yet finalized.
Plain-English glossary built in. Acronyms in the analysis page are underlined. Hover or tap for a one-line definition. Click to jump to the full glossary entry at the bottom of the page.
Jump to glossaryThe full cost-benefit dashboard has every number, every chart, and every source. The glossary at the bottom defines every term used.