MBTA seeking bids for overnight bus service

MBTA officials are soliciting bids from contractors for a proposed pilot program that would provide overnight bus service from Mattapan through downtown Boston, into East Boston and Chelsea.

General Manager Luis Ramirez yesterday said contractors have until Feb. 14 to submit proposals to provide vehicles, drivers and supervisors to run a single route every half-hour from 1 to 4:15 a.m. daily, starting July 1. Ramirez told the Fiscal and Management Control Board that once the proposals are in, it will have to weigh three questions.

“First, do we want to move forward with a pilot?” he said. “If so, then second, do we want to contract with a private operator, which could potentially run the service at no direct charge to our customers? Or third, do we want to operate this bus service internally, with MBTA vehicles and standard fare collection?”

The proposed contract, which may be awarded to one or more bidders, covers a period of one year, with two possible one-year extensions.

But the service would be evaluated after nine months, based on set performance measures.

“We’re trying to see what the appetite is to provide this service, what the cost of the service would be, and then we’ll try to make a thoughtful decision about what’s a sustainable financial model for night bus service that’s also consistent with kind of our previous actions around what’s financially sustainable for the T,” board member Steven Poftak told reporters. “So we’re looking forward to getting responses, but we’ll have to see what comes in.”

The MBTA has tried for years to create expanded service for riders. The T shuttered the first “Night Owl” iteration in 2005 after four years. It then launched another attempt in 2014 to extend service from 12:30 to 2:30 a.m. on weekends. But that program’s $14 million annual price tag and flagging popularity doomed it with T officials, who shut it down in 2016.

Later that year, the T considered a $1.5 million proposal from Boston-based Bridj to run a revived version of late-night service, but it never went ahead. Bridj shut down in April of last year.