The corridor already returns $1.71 per $1. A universal LGHS student/staff pass returns $4.51 per $1. Retiming Route 27 trips to land riders at school before the 08:30 bell, putting real signage and benches at school-adjacent stops, and funding the pass are the three asks we are taking into VTA — each defensible on its own, more powerful together.
Every Route 27 stop was scored on how much it is used and how close it sits to the next retained stop. The table below lists the ones flagged for a change: a few redundant stops to remove, a cluster to consolidate or upgrade, and school-adjacent stops to keep even at low current usage because removing them could strand students. The list is not final — it is being reviewed with VTA and LGUSD before any change is recommended.
| Stop | Recommendation | Usage proxy (boardings/yr) |
Distance to nearest stop (m) |
Near a school? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Remove — redundant, close to a retained stop | ||||
| Santa Cruz & Nicholson | Remove | 181 | 325 | No |
| Main & Santa Cruz | Remove | 181 | 413 | No |
| Main & Pleasant | Remove | 193 | 288 | Yes (LGHS — riders concentrate at Main & Villa) |
| Main & Jackson | Remove | 181 | 337 | Yes (LGHS — riders concentrate at Main & Villa) |
| Consolidate / upgrade — fold into the nearby stop with better shelter & access | ||||
| Los Gatos-Saratoga & Village Lane | Consolidate / upgrade | 193 | 176 | No |
| University & Mullen | Consolidate / upgrade | 193 | 224 | No |
| University & Royce | Consolidate / upgrade | 193 | 224 | No |
| Santa Cruz & Main | Consolidate / upgrade | 193 | 239 | No |
| Blossom Hill & Entrada Cedros | Consolidate / upgrade | 320 | 302 | No |
| Cottle & Palmia | Consolidate / upgrade | 344 | 427 | No |
| Keep — low current usage but near a school (latent demand) | ||||
| Los Gatos & Nino | Keep (latent demand) | 386 | 251 | Yes |
| Los Gatos & Roberts | Keep (latent demand) | 386 | 251 | Yes |
| Blossom Hill & Chambertin | Keep (latent demand) | 380 | 261 | Yes |
| Blossom Hill & Parkcrest | Keep (latent demand) | 386 | 266 | Yes |
| Blossom Hill & Dartmouth | Keep (latent demand) | 386 | 266 | Yes |
| Blossom Hill & Park Crest | Keep (latent demand) | 380 | 341 | Yes |
| Los Gatos & Magneson | Keep (latent demand) | 374 | 372 | Yes |
| Los Gatos & Nino (opp. dir.) | Keep (latent demand) | 374 | 372 | Yes |
| Main & Villa | Keep (latent demand) | 193 | 429 | Yes (LGHS) |
| Main & Los Gatos Civic Center | Keep (latent demand) | 181 | 717 | Yes |
| Keep — flagged by the model, retained pending review | ||||
| Los Gatos & Stacia | Keep (under review) | 181 | 540 | No |
Source: VTA GTFS current feed · ranking from analysis/d2_stop_candidates.csv · methodology in §Methodology. Usage proxy is a frequency-based estimate of annual boardings, not observed counts.
Instead of rebuilding the alignment, the proposal we are taking into VTA Commissioner input is a bundle of three changes that reinforce each other. Each is defensible on its own; together they are far more powerful.
Free bus passes are the cornerstone of Los Gatos transit improvement. They provide for the most vulnerable members of the community, allowing LGHS students and hardworking staff to thrive regardless of economic background. Furthermore, they address a key gap in knowledge of the public transit system, motivating kids to explore local transit options by placing a bus pass in each student's hand. VTA has offered the Town a SmartPass deal at $41,080/year covering every LGHS student and staff member, starting with a six month pilot program to test efficacy. For context, buying monthly passes individually for just the survey-identified interested cohort would cost $22,830–$78,458, factoring in margin of error. So, for a six month pilot, the Town would waste no more than $9,125 — but could build a system that would save students $37,000/yr while creating 76 new riders. This investment would return $4.51 per dollar spent — the single highest-return marginal intervention in the analysis. Thus, implementing such a system is the primary goal of the Think Tank.
One retimed AM trip per school — four trips total — each re-using an existing trip pattern's running times. Only the terminus departure shifts; no new buses are required.
| School delivered | Leaves from | Departs terminus | Arrives at school |
|---|---|---|---|
| LGHS (Main & Villa) | Santa Teresa Station | 7:04 | 8:15 |
| Dartmouth MS | Santa Teresa Station | 7:44 | 8:15 |
| Union MS | Winchester Station (Bay 2) | 7:28 | 8:15 |
| Fisher MS | Winchester Station (Bay 2) | 7:41 | 8:15 |
All four arrive comfortably ahead of the 8:30 first bell. Source: analysis/d1_proposed_schedule.md, VTA GTFS feed.
Currently, many buses arrive near schools at or directly after school start times due to traffic or poor scheduling, meaning students must take early-morning routes to arrive at school on time. Survey data shows that a minimum of 103 students from just LGHS and Union would switch from driving to busses if timing improved. The proposed retime, using school bell schedules and GTFS realtime bus data as a proxy for congestion, delivers riders to all four R27-served school stops between 08:10 and 08:25 without breaking Santa Teresa / Winchester LRT connections or Route 37 timed transfers. It does this all with minimal investment from VTA, merely using existing resources more efficiently to boost ridership and achieve long-term transit goals.
The biggest gap in the bus program right now is simply the fact that it flies under the radar. If no one processes its existence and has the tenacity to find information on its stops and schedule, no one will take it. Town nonprofits including Safe Routes to Schools are already working to integrate instruction on public transit knowledge and competency into their middle school curriculum, addressing this issue at the root. The next step is making the route more visible and appealing. Most Route 27 stops are bare signposts, barely visible to those who do not actively seek them out. Improvements can hugely increase the efficacy of the bus route. LG Think Tank has already identified a number of stops for transit improvements, including those with currently unsatisfactory ridership and those in major downtown areas with high public visibility. Making these target improvements should allow VTA to receive high benefit for low cost by creating a town oriented around transit, instead of one where transit seems to be a visible afterthought.
A natural question, and one we asked ourselves first: can't this just be solved by redrawing the route? We ran the standard tools to find out. Clarke-Wright savings, OpenTripPlanner accessibility scoring, and a custom Python scorer using FTA 9040.1G spacing rules all produced the same shape of answer: a handful of redundant stops are worth consolidating, and the existing alignment is already near the efficient frontier for the demand it currently sees. Three stops pass every removal gate (≤153 m from a retained stop, below 5th-percentile usage, not a terminal, not near a school); another ~6 are consolidation candidates.
That work is useful — it produced the ranked-stops map above and a defensible consolidation list. But optimizers operate on the variables they can see: stop spacing, trip frequency, walk-shed coverage. They are blind to the variables that actually constrain Route 27 ridership today: whether the bus arrives before the bell, whether a student knows the route exists, and whether the fare is a barrier. Those are the three the plan above addresses directly.
In other words: the optimizer output is supporting evidence for the consolidation asks, and a useful sanity check that the existing alignment is sound. It is not the lever — and that is consistent with the literature on suburban fixed-route service, where mode-shift is driven primarily by frequency, fare, and reliability rather than by alignment geometry.
That is also why a full route redesign is a later question, not a now question. The working baseline is to rerun the ridership analysis six months after the pass launches and the stop classification at twelve months, and only consider full route engineering after a year of post-pass data. Habit formation takes time, so a calendar trigger is more honest than a ridership threshold for judging when the alignment is worth revisiting.
Two worktrees, run end-to-end against the same VTA GTFS feed and Census ACS data. The
cost-benefit half is locked-down Phase A from the confident-carson tree;
the optimization, accessibility, and ranking work is in zealous-payne and
pedantic-antonelli. Every method below was applied to Route 27 and the
output is on disk.
| Method / Tool | What it does | Standard / source |
|---|---|---|
| OpenTripPlanner 2.x | Built a transit + walk accessibility graph from the VTA GTFS feed plus OpenStreetMap. Used for baseline isochrones, 400 m / 800 m walk-shed buffers around every Route 27 stop, and to compute service-gap polygons. | OTP project (Conveyal / community) |
| Clarke-Wright savings | Builds efficient route sequences by merging trip pairs wherever the distance saving is positive. Applied to the 16-district origin-destination matrix to test whether a redrawn corridor beat the existing one. Result: existing alignment is already near-optimal under current demand assumptions. | TCRP Report 19 |
| Custom Python optimizer | Scored every existing and candidate stop on a two-dimensional usage-proxy × distance-to-nearest-retained criterion. Confirmed 3 removes (5th-percentile floor) plus a 10th-percentile consolidation cohort. The optimizer never elected to add stops on the existing alignment. | fix_stop_removal.py · d2_build_candidates.py |
| FTA Circular 9040.1G spacing | Minimum and maximum stop spacing rules: quarter-mile urban, half-mile suburban. Candidate stops that violated spacing were rejected; existing stops that violated minimum spacing became consolidation candidates. | FTA Circular 9040.1G (superseded by 9040.1H) |
| Haversine ranking | Great-circle distance from every stop to its nearest same-direction retained stop, used as the geometric input to the removal score. 3 stops are within 153 m of a retained stop; another ~6 fall in the 175–300 m consolidation band. | analysis/d2_stop_candidates.csv |
| Frequency-proportioned ridership proxy | Per-stop annual boardings estimated as (trips_at_stop ÷ total_trips) × 61,350, anchored to the audited VTA Title VI FY2023 baseline. Used because stop-level APC data was not available from VTA. Calibration factor 0.199 brings the model to within +0.5% of observed. |
VTA Title VI FY2023 Table 3.2 |
| Mohring headways | Derives optimal frequency from ridership demand. Higher demand justifies shorter headways because the wait-time cost is shared among more passengers. Used as a sanity check on the existing Route 27 timetable, not to drive a redesign. | Mohring (1972), Transport Economics |
| Wait-time elasticity (TCRP 95) | Used by the in-progress D3 deliverable: translate the runtime savings from removing redundant stops (minutes per trip) into a ridership uplift via the standard −0.5 to −0.9 perceived-wait elasticity, then run the uplift through the existing CBA. | TCRP Report 95 |
| School-constraint check (D1) | Four R27-served schools sit on the corridor: LGHS (164 m), Union MS (96 m), Dartmouth MS (980 m), Fisher MS (1.27 km, marginal). All five LGUSD bell-time schools start 08:30. Bell-aligned retimed trips re-use existing trip patterns; only terminus departure shifts. | LGUSD bell schedules · GTFS stop_times.txt |
| Paired LGHS + Union MS bus survey | LGHS N=197 (~10% of student body), Union MS N=705 (~70% of student body). Frequency tables on mode, awareness, primary barriers, preferred improvements, and willingness-to-switch. Wait-tolerance distributions (5 min / 10 / 20 / 30 / 45 / 1 hr) feed the bell-alignment design. Auto-displacement cross-tab recalibrates pct_diverted_from_auto for the pass scenario. |
Youth Commission / Traffic Safety Ad-Hoc, Jan–May 2026 |
| QGIS / GeoPackage export | Five presentation-ready maps: baseline coverage, optimized coverage, service-gap polygons, school walk-sheds, and the ranked-stops layer that backs the embedded map above. | QGIS 3.x · GeoPackage 1.3 |
| GTFS data | Two ways. First, VTA's published schedule (the static GTFS feed) gives every stop's scheduled arrival time. Second, observed GTFS-realtime arrivals show when buses actually show up; the gap between the two is our stand-in for congestion, since a bus that runs consistently late is hitting traffic. The bell-aligned retime sets each new terminus departure so the actual arrival lands in the school window, and the result is written back out as a valid GTFS feed (stops, trips, stop_times, routes, calendar, shapes) encoding the proposed D1 timetable. | GTFS Schedule Reference v2.0 |
Every acronym and key concept used in this project. Hover any underlined term in the page text for a definition. Click to jump here.