Phil Eng is open to adding late-night T service. Advocates say the economic benefits for region could be huge.

Fernando Solarte posed for a portrait in downtown Chelsea.Erin Clark/Globe Staff

Darkness has descended on Boston and the streets are calm. It is nearing midnight, and Fernando Solarte is wrapping up his shift at Ginger Exchange in Mission Hill, where the line cook prepares Asian fusion dishes. Solarte, who relies on public transportation, keeps his eyes on the clock. His options to get home to Chelsea are growing scarcer by the minute. He needs to catch the next MBTA bus.

“I need to run to a station,” said Solarte, 36. “I lose this bus, I need to walk to my home or I need to pay Uber.”

That is an expense he can hardly afford. He makes minimum wage. The bus is his lifeline.

By 1 a.m. in Boston, most trains and buses have stopped running, and efforts to make late-night public transportation a reality have been marked by fits and stops for at least a decade. But the idea remains popular among many riders. And for people who work late into the night, often lower-income people or people of color, it’s a matter of equity.

Earlier this month, MBTA general manager Phillip Eng seemingly breathed new life into the long-running debate: He is open-minded about late-night service, he said, responding to a question during an appearance on GBH News’ “Boston Public Radio.”

No concrete plan is in the works, Eng stressed later in an interview. “There’s still a long road ahead of us,” he acknowledged, but added, “one of my objectives and goals is always to keep an eye on the future.”

Eng, who was formerly president of the Long Island Rail Road in New York, where public transit runs 24/7, said “there could be areas where, in the future, targeted service is going to be invaluable to the public that we serve,” such as third-shift workers, including doctors, security officers, custodians, and hotel concierges.

Corean Reynolds, the city of Boston’s first director of nightlife economy, called Eng’s comments encouraging and said Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration will continue working with T officials to find solutions.

“All nighttime workers — whether nurses or bartenders — should have access to the same resources as our 9 to 5 workforce,” Reynolds said in a statement.

Late-night service has been tried before in Greater Boston.

In 2014, a pilot program brought extended hours to the subway and key bus routes on Friday and Saturday nights. Two years later, T officials killed it, citing a lack of ridership and high costs. Proponents argue that it was doomed from the start, hampered by a lack of promotional support from businesses and no network of routes that connected to allow passengers to transfer and travel farther distances.

Later, TransitMatters proposed overnight T bus service, and its initiative “NightBus” ultimately led to two bus pilots in 2018, said Jarred Johnson, executive director of the advocacy group. Some late-night and early-morning trips were made permanent, but most bus and train service does not start until 5 a.m., according to the T.

A crowded Green Line train car.Andrew Burke-Stevenson for The Boston Globe

Today, optimism for more late-night service is low among advocates and city leaders — at least for now. The widely held consensus is that the transit agency has other priorities to tackle before it could be seriously considered, including improving safety and reliability issues.

The T is also staring down an operations funding gap that could balloon to more than $700 million next summer, making calls for more spending even more of a long shot.

“It’s simply not feasible,” said Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board. For one, the subway system has a single set of tracks, hence the overnight shutdowns for repairs and maintenance work.

Providing more service also requires additional staff that the agency does not now have. “The costs to operate this well exceed fare revenue, well exceed the average subsidy level for a standard trip,” Kane said.

Dwaign Tyndal said many Black and brown riders are “skeptical at best” that change is coming. Tyndal, the executive director of Alternatives for Community & Environment, an environmental justice and transit-oriented development nonprofit based in Roxbury, said rebuilding trust with riders will be a difficult task.

“Don’t tell me what you gonna get me for Christmas when you can’t feed me breakfast,” he said of late-night service.

Nationwide, Black and Hispanic or Latino workers are more likely to work the night shift than those who are white or Asian American, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released in 2019.

Some see equity and growth opportunities in expanding how late the transit system runs.

“We should create aspirations for transportation and mobility in terms of what we want our system to look like,” said Jim Rooney, CEO and president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, who pushed back against the notion that late-night service would only benefit revelers at bars and clubs, which must close at 2 a.m. in Boston.

“We have increasingly a 24-hour economy as it is,” Rooney said. “It really has a business component.”

Frequently, the business organization A Better City hears from large employers in sectors such as health and human services who say that the lack of overnight service is a hindrance for recruiting and retention, said the group’s CEO and president, Kate Dineen.

From an economic standpoint, late-night service is exciting, said Mimi Ramos, executive director of New England United 4 Justice — an organization that serves areas including Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, and Hyde Park — noting that it would give workers struggling to make ends meet more flexibility with travel.

The high cost of living continues to force residents to move outside the city, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean their jobs are” leaving Boston, Ramos said. Later operating hours would “make moving around their own neighborhoods in the city, and going to and from work, a hell of a lot easier,” she added.

In Chelsea, one of the poorest communities in the state where nearly 68 percent of the population is Latino, most people work two jobs, said Giovanny Cuniga, a transit organizer with the advocacy group GreenRoots. Extended hours would lessen the strain on their wallets.

When the line cook Solarte gets off the last bus out of town and finally gets to his home in Chelsea, often around 1:30 a.m. if he is lucky, he has little time to relax. His family has long gone to sleep. For just a few hours, Solarte will get some shut-eye, too.