New York City Council Approves Ban on Horse-Drawn Carriages

New York City cannot keep a timetable, a budget, or a subway platform. It can, however, ban the horses.

That is the victory the City Council just voted itself: Romanch’s Law, a phase-out of Central Park carriage rides by June 2028, named for an 18-year-old killed in a carriage accident in June. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office says he intends to sign it. A grieving family has been handed a statute. An industry older than the Brooklyn Bridge has been handed an execution date.

The death was real, and it was awful. That does not make the policy serious. If a single fatal accident were grounds for abolition, the Council would have to begin with cars, e-bikes, and the transit system — the ordinary machinery of the city, which kills and maims far beyond anything the carriage trade will ever do. It will not begin there. Those risks are politically inconvenient. A horse in Central Park is not.

So safety is the language, not the standard. Opponents of the carriages have wanted this ban for years, long before Romanch Mahajan died. His name now makes dissent look callous and spares the Council the question it prefers not to answer: why this risk, already fenced in by rules, and not the larger ones New York tolerates every afternoon? Governments that actually manage danger write limits — hours, weather, traffic, veterinary standards, the kind of constraints the city already imposes. Governments that have decided an activity is morally unclean write prohibitions and name them after victims.

Look at who pays. Not the advocates. Not the members who get to feel humane on the way to dinner. Carriage owners protested outside City Hall because the city is erasing businesses they describe as family livelihoods. The Transport Workers Union says it will sue in federal court on the grounds that a required economic impact analysis was never completed. Sit with that. The political faction that never stops invoking workers just moved to liquidate a trade a union is now going to court to defend, and the union’s first allegation is that the city could not be bothered to finish its own homework.

The statute promises a transition plan for workers in 2027 and “humane placement” for the horses. Read the order of concern. The end date is already fixed. The horses receive a conscience clause. The people receive a committee and a sunset. That is the progressive city in miniature: animals as wards of the state, workers as a public-relations problem to be managed on the way out.

None of this requires a romantic view of every operator. If a particular driver is cruel or reckless, punish that driver. What the Council has done instead is decide that a 160-year civic custom — one of the few remaining things in Manhattan that looks like the city people came to see — is an embarrassment to be cleared away. Tourists will survive. The drivers will not, at least not in the work they chose, under rules they were already following.

Mamdani’s signature will surprise nobody. This is what ideological city government does well: the clean ban, the press conference, the moral certainty purchased at someone else’s expense. It is what that government does badly that should worry New York — order, competence, and the restraint to leave a lawful trade alone unless the evidence, not the activist calendar, demands otherwise.

The drivers are right to go to court. A city that will not complete the analysis its own process requires before destroying livelihoods has not earned deference. Not on horses. Not on the next sentimental prohibition, either.