This week's journey. How much more is a cab fare under congestion pricing, exactly?; Cops flooded the subways — and then assaults on cops spiked; New Jersey has a sinkhole problem, and more.
Once ostracized, Muslim transit workers say MTA is finally accommodating their faith
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.
“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.
Courtesy of Maeen Ali
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.”
Curious Commuter
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“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?”
- Diana from Manhattan
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 supplying an MTA piggy bank that receives far less scrutiny.
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We're also talking about...
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.
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.
Second Avenue subway expansion inches forward. The MTA said it plans to hire a consultant to oversee construction of the Second Avenue subway's extension to East Harlem.
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.
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