In contrast, the real-life MBTA, for most of its recent history, shut down around 12:50 a.m. every night. The system is less than 11 months into a limited experiment with later weekend hours, but the end of the pilot period, originally set for March, could not have come at a worse time. The T, with its aged equipment, is creaking under the strain of two consecutive snowstorms. Newly installed Governor Charlie Baker is struggling with a budget gap that he estimates at $768 million . The $11 million net cost of late night T — two more hours of service on subways and 15 key bus routes on Friday and Saturday nights — is less than 1 percent of the transit agency’s operating budget. But in the current environment, it’s an obvious target.

If the MBTA were opening for business today for the first time, the trains and buses would unquestionably run later on weekends, when many more people are out and about after midnight, than on sleepy Mondays or Tuesdays. To design the system otherwise would mean deliberately ignoring the rhythms of customers’ lives.


The iffy prognosis for late-night T isn’t just a stinging disappointment for advocates of a livelier Boston, or an impending setback for the thousands of hospitality and health care workers who’ve been using the service to get home. It also presents Massachusetts’ new governor with a choice between two different visions of his job.

Baker’s key selling points as a candidate were the depth of his experience in state government and his record as a private-sector health care executive. But the roles of seasoned Beacon Hill budget warrior and creative private-sector manager can work at cross purposes. “Last in, first out” is an unwritten rule of public budgeting; new stuff gets cut first.

In a fiscal crunch, will Baker try to pare back state government to its essentials circa 1998, the year he last served in public office? Or will he choose a different mission — the thrifty delivery of the public services that the economy of 2015 requires?

Together, Boston and Cambridge have gained 105,000 new residents since the last time Baker served in government; they account for fully a quarter of the state’s population growth since 1998. Instead of fending off disinvestment and flight to the suburbs, the region’s urban core needs help moving people around and accommodating geographically mobile younger workers.


Over the years, though, the growth in structural costs that are hard to scale back — debt service, employee pensions, and health care — has squeezed state and local governments’ ability to respond to changing circumstances. By committing to “hold the line” on taxes and protect cities and towns from cuts to local aid, Baker has given himself little flexibility to adjust the basket of services that the state and its subsidiary agencies provide.

Baker’s transportation secretary, Stephanie Pollack, announced Thursday that late night service would continue until the T’s spring schedule ends in June. But the other noises coming out the Transportation Building offer little encouragement. “I think it’s too early to say it’s on the chopping block,” then-acting secretary Frank DePaola told a State House News Service reporter last month, “but in the light of our current state budgetary issues, we do have to be fiscally prudent here.”

“I have three kids who are millennials. I hear from them and their friends,” Pollack said Thursday. “I get it, but I have a lot other things that I’m trying to do, that the T is trying to do, that require investment as well, and there are just going to be hard choices.”


Pollack has promised a data-driven process for deciding the program’s fate. Ridership was strong for most of last year — about 17,000 to 20,000 per weekend until Thanksgiving — but cooled with the weather. While virtually all transit services lose money, Pollack said the $7.68 per-passenger subsidy for late night T was much higher than she expected. (By comparison, the subsidy for regular bus service is $2.74.)

Yet letting the service lapse isn’t the only option. With a year of experience, the T can economize by adjusting how often trains and buses should run, on which lines, during which seasons.

For better or worse, the value of transit depends partly on subjective factors. Alas, Boston police haven’t specifically tracked whether the availability of late night transit has cut down on drunken driving, or on the fights that infamously broke out in taxi lines in front of nightclubs at closing time. After just 10 months, it’s impossible to detect whether later transit has made Boston more attractive in relation to competitor cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, all of which offer comparable service at a significant loss. The benefits only become apparent over time. Visit D.C.’s bustling U Street at 2 a.m. on a weekend, and it’s evident how late-night service — inaugurated in 2003 — helped the nation’s capital banish its dowdy image and created new opportunities for residents and businesses.

The danger in Greater Boston is that late-night T will have to meet a standard that longer-established initiatives, from transit routes to tax breaks, would surely flunk. The burden on Baker and his team is to find room for promising but unproven initiatives — and to find ways to make them sustainable. A state that vies for talent nationally and globally shouldn’t decide what to cut based upon what it’s always done.


Related:

• Charles Chieppo: How to fix the T

• Editorial: Keep late-night MBTA on track

• Editorial: Funding for T upkeep must not be crowded out by growth plans

• Editorial: Baker’s chance for tomorrow’s transportation

Dante Ramos can be reached at dante.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @danteramos.