At $3.5M a year, Mountain View commits to free community shuttle service

Barney Morgan has been riding Mountain View’s community shuttle for years, enjoying its convenience, reliability and fare-free service. So it came as a surprise to Morgan when the shuttle started to deviate from its usual routine about a month ago.

Drivers were waiting at every stop to pick up passengers, even when nobody was planning to get on or off, Morgan said. It added delays to the schedule. At the same time, a survey was being administered to passengers asking about their level of satisfaction with the service, he said.

Morgan was concerned that the shuttles were in jeopardy after serving the community for nearly 10 years. However, the city maintains that nothing is changing with the service.

“We intend to continue the same frequency, route, hours of service as it was before, and we haven’t changed and don’t plan to change anything,” said Ed Arango, Mountain View acting public works director.

Still, there have been some modifications to how the city is paying for the shuttle service. Until recently, it was being subsidized by Google, which launched the community shuttle as a pilot program in 2015.

In 2020, Google fully transitioned the shuttle operations to the city, while still continuing to fund a part of it. That agreement ended in June, and now Mountain View is paying for the community shuttle in its entirety, which is projected to cost about $3.5 million annually, Arango said.

The city also has entered into a three-year agreement with Mountain View Transportation Management Association to operate and manage the shuttles, which it has been doing since 2020, according to a report presented to the City Council in May.

As of now, the community shuttle is largely being funded by revenue from the city’s business license tax. The city also had relied on the VTA Measure B sales tax to expand the shuttle’s weekday service hours, although that money is now fully expended, according to the council report.

Overall, the city is happy with how the shuttle has been meeting the needs of the community, Arango said, and the service is growing in popularity too. Before the pandemic, the shuttle had close to 800 daily riders on weekdays and about 300 daily riders on weekends. Ridership dropped during the county’s shelter-in-place mandates, as was the case across all public transit. But it has been steadily increasing since then and is now at 130% of pre-pandemic levels, according to Arango.

“It has bounced back and even grown further,” Arango said.

The Mountain View community shuttle operates seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends and holidays. It has 50 stops throughout the city that includes service to shopping centers, parks, the senior center, El Camino Hospital and downtown Mountain View.