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When the City Council votes Thursday on a bill to ban Central Park’s horse carriages, the decision could reverberate far beyond the industry’s workers and the fanatics who have lobbied to abolish their trade.
If the vote succeeds, it will demonstrate that New York’s turn toward the radical left goes far beyond Mayor Zohran Mamdani — and that Julie Menin, the supposedly more moderate council speaker, isn’t checking Mamdani’s extremism but enabling it.
It will also show that this council is uninterested in facts or data.
The ban is ostensibly spurred by public peril: The council’s July hearing on the issue came just a month after a horse-carriage crash killed passenger Romanch Mahajan, an 18-year-old tourist from India.
Mahajan’s death was awful — but it’s the only known instance of a human fatality in Central Park carriage history.
The best theory of why the horse bolted is that it was shocked by stray underground voltage — a dangerous condition that the city and the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that manages the park, should have warned drivers about.
Yes, the conservancy, which supports the ban, will yammer on about eight “incidents” over 13 months, including “collisions” and “injured drivers.”
But it presents these numbers in a vacuum.
If you tried to tally every comparable Central Park “incident” of a collision between cyclists, or of a pedicab operator driving illegally on pedestrian paths, you’d come up with thousands of them.
One of the conservancy’s reported “incidents” was of a horse that died this year — after eating poisonous shrubs planted by the park.
If we’re going to play this game, remember that a conservancy motor vehicle hit and killed Barry, the beloved barred owl, five years ago.
Further, the council is ignoring facts and data on the horses themselves.
The animals, benefiting from roomy stables, mandated vet checkups and vacations, are treated well.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg couldn’t secure an animal-cruelty conviction last year of one driver whose horse died on the street — because a jury accepted that his horse had suffered from a stealthy cancer.
If the council were following park safety data, it would focus on bikes and crime.
Since Mahajan’s death, three other people have died violently in Central Park — two in bike crashes, and one, homeless artist Lee Rogers, beaten to death.
Rogers was particularly vulnerable because the city isn’t enforcing rules against camping in the park overnight.
Get rid of carriages, and we’ll likely see even more bike crashes: The horses set a slow pace, so removing them will allow pedicab drivers and e-bikers to go faster than ever.
In ignoring facts, the council would abolish a thriving small business.
About 200 people work in an industry that brings in millions of tourist dollars each year with no public subsidy.
The council’s fix for putting families on the unemployment rolls involves directing the mayor to create a “workforce transition program,” helping them drive a pedicab or a bus.
It doesn’t occur to Menin and the council that people choose jobs they enjoy — carriage drivers like horses! — and aren’t widgets to be swapped from one role to another via central planning.
Relatedly, the ban would extinguish the value of private assets.
The medallions that the city issued decades ago for the right to operate horse carriages have since traded for six figures on the open market.
Horses and carriages have value, too — but the bill would prohibit owners from selling horses to a buyer operating carriages in another city.
It’s a grab reminiscent of Mamdani’s rent freeze, which diminishes private property values for the supposed collective good.
Banning horses goes even further, extinguishing the value of regulated but private property.
Why is the council doing this?
Perhaps because moneyed special interests — primarily animal-rights activists funded by a real-estate magnate — have focused on banning horses for nearly two decades.
Previous speakers have fended them off, sometimes at political cost.
In caving, this council will look weak — and it will set a precedent.
Nobody knows what targets the Mamdani administration will choose over the next two years.
But if the socialist mayor becomes more extreme — moving, say, to expropriate private supermarkets for the “abuse” of charging market prices, or promising another four-year rent freeze that would extinguish the value of many properties — he could argue: I’m only following the philosophy that the City Council set.
Mamdani has said he will sign this horse ban, abolishing a private industry with a pen stroke — and to him, it might seem like a great start.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a 2026 CCNY Moynihan Center senior fellow.