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Muslim transit workers say MTA is finally accommodating their faith
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
Published Mar 28, 2025
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Ramsey Khalifeh
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
Published Mar 28, 2025
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This column originally appeared in On The Way, a weekly newsletter covering everything you need to know about NYC-area transportation.
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As the Islamic holy month of Ramadan comes to an end this weekend, dozens of Muslim transit workers are thanking the MTA for giving them time and space to practice their faith.
The agency has, over the last year, opened new prayer rooms at two of Brooklyn’s largest bus depots, offering workers an accommodation that was unimaginable just a few years ago.
Maeen Ali, who works at the East New York depot, said he worked with the MTA to set up a prayer room in January 2024 for the roughly 20 Muslim employees at the sprawling facility.
“You have supervisors and then you have operators, then you have maintenance, different departments and a lot of people would come together and pray,” said Ali, who leads the prayers as the group’s imam. “When you come to the prayer room, you’re not a supervisor, you’re not an operator, you’re just a Muslim brother.”
Muslims believe in praying five times a day, in alignment with different positions of the sun. Some follow the practice more closely during holy months like Ramadan, when they fast from sunrise to sunset. But at any time of the year, practicing Islam can be challenging for workers whose job requires them to drive a bus on a tight schedule all over the city.
Ali, who’s worked for the MTA for 15 years, said Muslim workers long felt ostracized because they didn’t have space to practice their faith during breaks at work.
The prayer room inside the East New York bus depot.
Courtesy Maeen Ali
“There’s a particular incident where a guy had a locker right next to where we were praying and he had some kind of pictures of women [that] are not appropriate,” said Ali, recalling an incident from 2010. “I kind of approached him with that. He said, ‘Go practice your religion somewhere else.’”
With the new prayer room, Ali said workers at the depot can more easily pray dhuhr, the midday prayer, during their lunch breaks.
Progress to accommodate Muslim transit workers didn’t come easily. The Department of Justice sued the MTA in 2004 for a “pattern and practice” of discrimination against transit workers who wore hijabs or turbans, in some cases reassigning employees who refused to remove their head coverings to comply with the agency’s uniform policies. The MTA agency later settled with the DOJ and adopted new policies for religious accommodations.
Today, the MTA’s policy allows reasonable accommodation for drivers to take days off for religious holidays — though some Muslim drivers struggled to get last-minute time-off requests approved for Eid al-Fitr last year.
Ali said he’s trying to help workers at other transit facilities open their own prayer rooms to practice their faith. One opened at the MTA’s Jackie Gleason bus depot in Sunset Park last month, just in time for Ramadan. The area opened under the direction of TWU Local 100 Depot Chair Robert Martinez.
“I’m close with the Muslim brothers here,” said Martinez, who estimates about 80 Muslim operators work at the depot. “We’ll sit down and we’ll play chess and talk Quran.”
Have a question about subway cars (or literally anything else NYC-transit related)? Use this form to submit yours and we may answer it in a future newsletter!
But note that Curious Commuter questions are exclusive for On The Way newsletter subscribers. Sign up for free here.
Dianna, from Manhattan
If yellow taxi passengers only pay a nominal congestion pricing fee of 75 cents per trip, then why do I see a $2.50 congestion surcharge on my receipt?
Answer
That $2.50 isn’t actually related to the MTA’s new congestion pricing fees that launched in January. The fee is directly tied to the collapse of subway service eight years ago — and the mad dash by a former governor (who’s now running for mayor) to pay for a rapid slate of infrastructure repairs. After 2017’s “Summer of Hell,” when the subway’s reliability fell to its lowest levels in decades, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo rolled out his “Subway Action Plan,” a roughly $860 million push to fix busted tracks, signals and other transit equipment.
But the move wasn’t a one-time cash injection. In 2018, the state Legislature and Cuomo approved a new $2.50 surcharge on any yellow taxi ride that enters Manhattan south of 96th Street (a $2.75 fee was imposed on Uber and Lyft rides that touch the same area). The first $300 million collected from those fees every year is directed to an obscure MTA “Subway Action Plan” account, which can be used to pay for anything from train operators’ salaries to construction contracts to debt service. Last year, most of the money was used for track repairs and subway car cleaning and maintenance, MTA records show.
Those fees are separate from the 75-cent congestion pricing fee now tacked onto yellow cab rides that enter Manhattan south of 60th Street.
The money from the new congestion pricing fees is required by state law to finance $15 billion worth of mass transit repairs through the MTA’s capital plan, which is thoroughly vetted by state lawmakers and the governor. But the $2.50 yellow taxi fees that Dianna noticed are filling an MTA piggy bank that receives far less scrutiny.
The Sinkhole State. NJ Transit this week is offering riders a 50% discount on select routes, hoping to limit traffic on I-80 while crews work to fix yet another sinkhole.
“It's Swiss cheese underground.”
- Sterling Hill Mining Museum President Bill Kroth on the sinkholes that keep opening in New Jersey
The cause of these sinkholes has been attributed to a series of abandoned mines beneath sections of I-80.
Cops flooded the subways. Now they’re being assaulted. MTA Chair Janno Lieber said a recent spike in assaults on police officers followed a similar pattern where a “cop stops someone for fare evasion or some other offense, and the offender hits the cop.”
A faster bus to LaGuardia? The Q70, a free bus that carries travelers from select train stations to LaGuardia Airport, could speed up under a plan to install a bus-only lane on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Fighting with the feds. Despite the Trump administration’s threats to cut MTA funding, Gov. Kathy Hochul sent a letter this week suggesting that she wants the feds to give the MTA billions of additional dollars to fund repairs.
Congestion pricing scorecard: The tolling program brought in nearly $52 million from drivers in February, putting congestion revenue on course to hit $500 million by the end of the year.
Man killed by e-biker. Police and witnesses say a man getting out of his double-parked car on a busy street in Greenpoint last Friday was fatally hit by a delivery worker who ran a stop sign on an e-bike.
Second Avenue subway expansion inches forward. The MTA said it plans to hire a consultant to oversee construction of the Second Avenue subway extension to East Harlem.
New-look Yankees, old-look trains. The New York Transit Museum is running nostalgia trains from Grand Central to Yankee Stadium today for the newly-hirsute Bronx Bombers’ home opener.
If a boat hits our bridges … it could be bad. The National Transportation Safety Board said a dozen bridges in New York and New Jersey haven’t undergone proper inspections for potential collapse from ship strikes like the one that took down a Baltimore bridge last year.
Listen to us talk about all this! Download our app and tune in to “All Things Considered” around 4 p.m. today. And catch up on last week’s segment in case you missed it.
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Ramsey Khalifeh
Ramsey Khalifeh is a transportation reporter on the NYC Accountability desk covering the largest transit system in the country. He was previously a general assignment reporter at Gothamist and worked on the Boston Globe's metro and copy desk. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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