Metro will soon propose a plan to subsidize Uber and Lyft rides for workers who get off after hours, the Washington Post reports. The subsidy will be up to $3 per ride, and would only take people to their workplaces or to their homes, according to the outlet, which obtained a presentation slide on the potential program.

The proposal is meant as an alternative to restoring late-night service hours on Metro, which Metro General Manager Paul Wiedefeld has consistently opposed despite pressure from D.C. politicians like Metro board chairman and Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, and Mayor Muriel Bowser. Wiedefeld and other Metro officials say they need to keep hours as they are in order to continue making progress on an extensive backlog of track work and maintenance projects.

Metro confirmed to the Post that it’s currently drafting a request for proposals on the Uber/Lyft subsidy program, which should be issued next month. As a part of the plan, workers would be given subsidized rates, and Uber would bill Metro for the subsidy after the fact. The subsidy would only be in effect from the hours of midnight to 4 a.m.

The controversy over restoring late-night hours began last December, when Evans announced that he and Corbett Price, D.C.’s other representative on the Metro board, would vote against a proposal by Wiedefeld to extend shorter hours on the transit system. Their no votes would have triggered an automatic veto of the proposal, as board rules hold that at least one representative from each jurisdiction (D.C., Maryland, and Virginia) must vote in favor of a plan in order for it to take effect.

Late night hours were first cut short during “Safe Track” in 2016, Metro’s year-long intensive track work program. In July 2017, the Metro board approved a two-year extension of the cut on hours to allow the agency to perform more work. Even back then the plan was controversial—Evans said at the time that he’d had to convince the mayor to get on board.

Now that the two-year extension is coming to a close this summer, Wiedefeld wants it to be extended again. This would preserve the agency’s current closing times of 11:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday, and 11 p.m. Sunday. The agency says the late-night cuts have provided its crews with crucial night time work hours that it needs to fix some urgent problems on the system.

“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 told DCist in an email in December. “Eventually, reliability and safety suffered, reached a critical point and the result was SafeTrack. This is all about preventing SafeTrack 2.0.”

But Evans, Bowser, and others say that late night hours on the service are crucial for service employees in hotels and restaurants, many of whom can work into the wee hours of the morning. Metro offered some alternative schedule possibilities to try to allay that concern, but Bowser wasn’t having any of it.

“I think we know when an agency doesn’t want to do something they present the worst possible scenario,” Bowser said at a D.C. Council breakfast last month. “So my challenge to Metro is to show how they are making their (maintenance operations) more efficient with the funding we gave them.”

This Uber/Lyft subsidy appears to be the agency’s response to criticism about late night workers’ need for service. At this point, it looks like Wiedefeld will get his way: The Post reports that Evans is expected to be the only “no” vote on Wiedefeld’s proposal to extend late-night hours, which will take place at a Metro board meeting on Thursday.

Bowser’s office is unimpressed with the possible new plan. “While we always welcome these types of fresh ideas and others like jet packs to replace bus bridges and cryptocurrency to replace Smartrip cards, let’s keep the focus where it ought to be: Metro fulfilling its commitment to restoring late night hours,” Bowser chief of staff John Falcicchio told the Post.

This post has been updated with comment from Bowser’s office.