There simply isn't a good reason to have 24 hour service on the metro.

Even when they had 3am service on weekends only about 1,500 people an hour used it after midnight. On weekdays that would probably be 500 or fewer.

Metro costs over $100,000 an hour to run, and much of that is fixed and doesn't go down running fewer trains - station manager salaries, electricity to the stations, Metro police, etc.

I'm the first person who will tell you that public transit shouldn't be expected to make money, but there's a common sense limit. Spending $200 per passenger to keep a subway running that nobody uses is well over that limit.