SAN JOSE — Hop on the Line 13 for a 35-minute journey into South San Jose and you’ll find a vastly different Valley Transportation Authority experience than you will on more popular corridors.

Driver Belinda Vestal greets regulars by name, with a smile, and they return the favor. It’s not uncommon for Vestal to be offered homegrown fruit or a slice of freshly baked cake as riders pass the farebox. And if you’re short a quarter, aspiring actor Andrew Lucero, 21, might save the day and float you some change if he happens to be riding shotgun.

“It’s like my family,” said Vestal, who has worked various VTA lines for 22 years but has a particular affinity for the lightly traveled Line 13, which carries passengers from stops near Oakridge Mall almost out to Almaden Quicksilver County Park. “There’s a lot of seniors on this line and they’re adorable. A lot of people who don’t speak English. There’s some people I see three times a day.”

The Line 13 is also rarely crowded. On a recent trip, during peak hours, just six people boarded Vestal’s bus. That’s why the talk among riders is turning turned to the future.

With a staggering 23 percent drop in ridership on buses and light rail since 2001, VTA is considering big changes. Currently, nearly a third of bus service is geared to areas with few riders, which is forcing VTA to consider a fundamental question.

“Is high ridership what’s wanted?” asked VTA senior planner Adam Burger at a recent community meeting in Milpitas. “Do we want to run it like an airplane and serve the most popular routes? Or do we provide geographical coverage as a social service?”

With BART service scheduled to land just north of the county line with test runs expected to begin at a Warm Springs station in the fall, VTA is considering rejiggering service in what it calls a “Next Network” plan.

The current model is a 70-30 split: Most of the service is for high-passenger routes, with the less popular lines garnering a smaller slice of the pie. VTA is considering whether to keep that split or reduce service on less traveled lines like the 13.

Because farebox revenue accounts for only 10 percent of VTA’s operating budget, adding buses to busy lines isn’t a profitable or even break-even proposition. The bulk of VTA money comes from sales taxes.

“They should increase service on everything, but if we’re going to sacrifice one for the other that’s no good,” said Carlton Perry, a 69-year-old who lives in Evergreen, which he said might as well be Timbuktu in terms of bus service.

He had just disembarked the heavily traveled 22 on a recent windy and cloudy day and was waiting to catch the sparser 31 at the Eastridge Transit Center.

Perry, a retiree who relies on public transit to get to medical appointments downtown, said if they discontinued the 31, “I would be screwed.”

Gissel Alvarenga, 21, also takes the busy 22 line, for both school and work. She said it does get cramped and sometimes two buses will line up at the same time to siphon an overflow of passengers from a crowded stop. But Alvarenga agreed relief shouldn’t come from cutting less traveled lines.

“If they can’t just hire more people they should just leave it as is,” she said. “It’s not fair to add more there if that’s going to eliminate it for others.”

VTA is quick to reassure riders that nothing is on the chopping block — yet. Officials are holding a series of community meetings this summer to collect feedback, which will be followed by a draft plan early next year with VTA board approval scheduled next April.

VTA spokeswoman Brandi Childress said that if more resources were dedicated to busier routes, it’s possible private sector sources could “help fill in the hole.”

“This is Silicon Valley and there’s a lot of innovation here,” she said. “Could we work with companies, or put out a smaller vehicle than a 40-foot bus? We can make those kinds of changes — all of this is on the table when we look at what could be done if we got rid of lower ridership lines.”

According to VTA, about 89 percent of county residents live within a half-mile of a bus, Caltrain or ACE stop. Under the extreme model of eliminating outlying routes, that drops to about 73 percent.

Burger said many residents of potentially affected areas, such as Almaden Valley and the outskirts of Morgan Hill, “often already have an auto-centered lifestyle.”

But Jyoti Smart, a Line 13 regular who has taken the bus to her job as an accountant for Santa Clara County for 25 years, said cutting lines doesn’t jibe with VTA’s commitment to the environment.

“The idea is to be green, to not get into your car,” she said. “If I have to drive four miles to get to light rail, I might as well just drive all the way downtown.”

Contact Eric Kurhi at 408-920-5852. Follow him at Twitter.com/erickurhi.