Reading the T leaves on late-night service

A passenger waits for the train to arrive at Prudential Station late on a Friday night in 2015, when the T experimented with running service until 2 a.m.Kieran Kesner

An offhand comment that MBTA general manager Phil Eng made on a radio show last week kicked up a flurry of speculation — was the T going to resume late-night subway service eight years after discontinuing it?

Turns out the answer, for now, is no. Trains stop running around 12:30 and that’s not changing any time soon.

But the fact that Eng is even open to the idea — “I’ve been talking with my operations folks regarding the potential for later night service,” he said — is welcome news during what is otherwise a gloomy season for the T, the Globe said in an editorial on Friday.

While the agency has more pressing needs now, “in the long term, late-night service ought to be part of the T’s future,” the editorial argued.

The last experiment with late-night subway service involved trains and buses running until 2 a.m. on weekends, but the program was canceled after two years over cost concerns. At the time, then-Globe columnist Dante Ramos dissected the reasons for its failure, spreading the blame around to politicians and the T itself. The late-night trains were subjected to unfair standards, he wrote, when the fact is that most of the T’s services require subsidies.

”Why judge late-night T by standards that other services would flunk?” he wrote.

The T’s situation now is a lot more dire than it was in 2016, after COVID-19 gutted ridership and federal regulators started scrutinizing the agency’s safety record. It’s facing a fiscal cliff that makes it challenging to hold on to the services it provides now, much less expand them.

But if post-COVID travel patterns endure, it may actually strengthen the case for late-night service. Serving the traditional white-collar, 9-to-5 commuter will become a less important part of the T’s job if those workers don’t come back to the office. But restaurant workers and bartenders can’t work remotely — and they’re the type of worker who’d benefit most if the trains ran later into the night.

This is an excerpt from Are we there yet?, a Globe Opinion newsletter about the future of transportation in the region. Sign up to get it in your inbox early.