Last month I wrote that the 1 year trial of late night MBTA service was being evaluated and that its future was in question. Late night service started on March 28, 2014 and earlier this month the MBTA announced that they would extend the service for an additional 3 months to June 19, 2015.
According to the MBTA, late night service, which runs on Friday and Saturday night, has supplied more than 1.1 million rides. That is pretty impressive if you think that the MBTA late night service only accounts for 3 additional hours of service each week. That 1.1 million rides then breaks down to approximately 12,500 – 13,000 riders who took the MBTA late night service over the past 44 weekends, which seems like a lot of people to me. The MBTA has never shared a projected ridership, so it is hard to tell what is considered “successful”. If you want to keep the MBTA late night service, I’d encourage you to continue to use it.
BosGuy 
Well we can work a little reverse math and figure out hourly ridership if that helps. For sake of argument we’ll say there were 50 weekends in the trial so far. At 3 hours extension times 2 for each day we get 6 hours per week.
6 hours times 50 = 300 hours total. 1.1 million divided by 300 = 3666.666666666667 riders per hour. Spread across the four subway lines it comes out to 916 per line.
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Just remember that Gov. Chuckles Baker has unfunded the service after June 30 (end of the fiscal year) as part of his cost cutting measures – after all he has a Massachusetts State Police Detail officer to drive him around – the last Governor NOT to use that perk on a daily basis was Dukakis who traveled the Green Line to the State House.
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