And for one month beginning in September, all service after 9 p.m. will be free on Friday and Saturday nights.
The changes are the T’s up-to-date attempt to stretch transit service deeper into the night, long a cause célèbre of politicians and advocates who say the expanded schedules simplify commutes for late-night workers and help Boston leave behind its reputation as a strait-laced town accustomed to closing shop not long after midnight.
“The idea is that you’re going to get a public transit system that you deserve, and that’s an option for you, that works for you,” Governor Maura Healey said at a press conference following the MBTA’s board of directors meeting Tuesday.
To entice more riders, the agency will make all subway lines, bus routes, ferries, commuter rail lines, and RIDE trips free on Fridays and Saturdays after 9 p.m. from Sept. 5 until Oct. 4.
MBTA general manager Phillip Eng said the upcoming bus and subway schedule changes will last “indefinitely.” A year’s worth of extended service should cost the agency around $2 million, he added.
Extending T service into the wee hours of the morning has historically been a politically popular but financially tenuous undertaking. But Eng appeared confident Tuesday that this venture into late-night service will succeed.
“It was built into our budget; we knew we could handle it. We knew that our workforce is ready to handle that, and our infrastructure is capable,” Eng said. “And we’re not doing this as a pilot. We’re doing this as part of a regular service change.”
Success, he continued, will be defined by the availability of the service, not its usage.
“We’re a public transit agency. We do it to provide a public service, and there’s a lot of people that needed to rely on this service that haven’t been able to use it,” Eng said. “That’s how we’re measuring success, not whether it’s 10 million people using it or 50 people using it.”
Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board, the T’s oversight body, said he trusted Eng but would track the “economics” of the service extension.
Kane said adding more hours to T service will increase pressure on the T, when its finances are projected to worsen in the next few years. History supports that point.
In 2001, the agency debuted a late-night bus service that shuttled passengers between downtown Boston and the city’s periphery. The “Night Owl” buses, at their conception, ran every half hour between 1 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. on weekends, following the paths of subway lines and several bus routes.
The service began as a one-year test run, an MBTA concession to an outspoken coalition of politicians, college students, worker groups, and anti-drunk driving advocates lobbying for more nocturnal transit options.
Some agency officials had resisted expansion of nighttime service, wary of low ridership, high operating costs, and disrupted overnight maintenance schedules.
The Night Owl proved popular in its early days, especially among inebriated twenty-somethings. But ridership slumped, even as the service dragged on in different forms beyond its initial one-year lifespan. Its benefits, critics said, paled in comparison to its costs. The MBTA ultimately killed the Night Owl in 2005.
Clamors for nighttime service extensions crescendoed again in the 2010s. Nurturing Boston’s vibrancy and youthful appeal had become a fashionable political issue. Expanding late-night transit options, its proponents argued, was essential to enlivening the city.
The T, in response, launched another one-year pilot program in 2014: a 90-minute extension of subway service and some popular bus routes on Friday and Saturday nights. By 2015, officials had begun sounding alarms about the long-term viability of the extended service, with the MBTA’s budgetary woes looming. The T extended a truncated version of the program that year.
The agency kept it alive until early 2016 when it decided it was too expensive to sustain. The MBTA spent upward of $14 million on the service extensions in fiscal year 2015.
Some T regulars, meanwhile, welcomed the agency’s up-to-date attempt.
Saloni Patel, a mechanical engineering student at Northeastern University, said the MBTA’s plan to run trains later into the night on Fridays and Saturdays “totally makes sense.”
“Honestly, that would be pretty nice for me,” Patel said. “Especially with college life, taking the Green Line after concerts or baseball games, it would be pretty nice.”
Julia Missagia, a neuroscience student at Northeastern, was equally delighted.
“Yes, definitely I would take advantage of it for sure,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll go out to dinner or, if we’re drinking or whatever, the subway is great. Ubers are way too expensive and driving in the city is just a pain.”
Missagia, who grew up in Franklin, also hopes the commuter rail will start running later.
One late-night commuter was not certain he would benefit from the change.
Graham Perrault, 39, works as a bartender and security at Durty Nelly’s, a pub a short stroll from City Hall and T stations.
Durty Nelly’s closes at 2 a.m. every day. Perrault usually drives to work from East Boston on weekends because the Blue Line stops running before his shift ends, he said. If he can get off work in time, he would take advantage of the later-running trains, he said.
“You don’t know if it’s going to be super helpful or not,” Perrault said.
Those dissatisfied with the T’s existing timetables don’t hesitate to point to the more robust late-night transit options in other American cities as aspirational examples.
New York City’s subway famously runs around the clock. Chicago keeps two of its ‘L’ train lines going 24/7. Philadelphia runs all-night bus service along some of its subway lines when trains are out of service.
D.C.-area subway trains generally operate until about midnight Monday through Thursday but wrap up service by around 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. The Bay Area runs its trains until about midnight every day of the week (though it phases out two of its five lines after 9 p.m.).
Eng had teased the possibility of extending the T’s nighttime service on a public radio appearance last fall.
Jaime Moore-Carrillo can be reached at jaime.moore-carrillo@globe.com. Sadaf Tokhi can be reached at sadaf.tokhi@globe.com.
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