Night owls across the District rejoice: if all goes as expected, Metro will reinstate late night service on the system during the summer of 2019. That means we’ll again see midnight closing times on weekdays and 3 a.m. closures on the weekends.

D.C.’s representatives on the Metro Board of Directors told reporters on Tuesday that they will veto a proposal to extend late night service cuts for yet another year. The Washington Post Express was the first to report on the predicted veto.

The District’s representatives on the board are Chair (and Ward 2 Councilmember) Jack Evans and Corbett Price. Evans tells DCist that both he and Price plan to reject a request from Metro General Manager Paul Wiedefeld to preserve limited night service on the system. Wiedefeld’s request would mean yet another year of closing at 11:30 p.m. on most weeknights and 1 a.m. on the weekends.

Evans’ and Price’s joint “no” votes automatically veto the proposal, because Metro rules require that all measures have the support of at least one board member from each jurisdiction (D.C., Virginia, and Maryland). The board will discuss the proposal at its Thursday meeting.

Late-night and weekend hours were first curtailed on a long-term basis during the year-long maintenance plan dubbed “SafeTrack,” which started in June 2016. Then, the Metro board approved a two-year-long service reduction beginning in July 2017 to allow Metro to perform more necessary (in some cases urgently necessary) track work at night. That vote was fraught—Evans said he had to convince Mayor Muriel Bowser to go along with the plan. Evans himself was initially resistant, but eventually agreed to the reduction with the stipulation that it would be temporary.

“I agreed to two years … for Metro to do some necessary work on our system,” Evans says. At this point, the agency has had hundreds of hours of extra “track time” to complete repairs, the councilmember says. “At this stage we will have to find that extra track time somewhere else. Not during late night hours,” Evans says.

Evans says the mayor and the chairman of the Council, Phil Mendelson, are in complete agreement that late night service should be reinstated. Evans says he has heard from many late-night workers affected by the service cuts, and he’s most concerned with making sure people working in hospitality or restaurants late at night are able to get home via Metrorail. He also hopes the hours will increase ridership, “because we really need more riders on Metro.”

Metro, for its part, says that the late night service cuts have been crucial in helping Metro address maintenance issues in a timely manner, which is ultimately better for riders.

“It’s important to remember why we have the current hours in place: As a result of multiple expansions of Metro service later and later into the night, work windows became so narrow that meaningful preventive maintenance was simply deferred and a huge backlog developed,” Metro spokesperson Dan Stessel tells DCist in an email. “Eventually, reliability and safety suffered, reached a critical point and the result was SafeTrack. This is all about preventing SafeTrack 2.0. The current hours are necessary to continue the preventive maintenance programs that have already significantly improved reliability and safety for Metrorail customers. We look forward to making the case on Thursday.”

If the veto happens as planned, the District’s residents will see later closures on Metro starting July 1, 2019.

This post has been updated with comment from Metro.