Ignore the blowhard activists— keep horse carriages in Central Park
The latest is Central Park Conservancy President Betsy Smith coming out in favor of a City Council bill to ban the carriages citywide.
'With visitation to the park growing to record levels,' she claims, the ban is 'a matter of public health and safety for park visitors.'
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In other words: Add the Conservancy to the long list of local nonprofits playing politics.
In fact, it's been making life harder for the horses and their trade for years now: The CPC's recent street-markings update failed 'to designate a mixed-use lane for carriages to use as there had been,' notes Pete Donohue, president of Transport Workers Union of America, the union that reps the carriage drivers.
Animal-welfare extremists and other ideologues have been trying to put the horses and their 200 carriage drivers and stable hands out of work for years.
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But those blue-collar, largely immigrant or first-generation American workers don't matter to the well-paid leaders of the park nonprofit, nor to the City Council members backing the ban.
As for safety in the park: Puh-leaze.
Smith cites two recent incidents where horses got free from their drivers and ran loose through the park, resulting in a handful of injuries.
That's nothing compared to the 522 bike-involved collisions, with one fatality, reported in the park from 2018 to 2022.
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Not to mention the menace of heavier, faster, more dangerous e-bikes and e-scooters — plus the scandal-plagued pedicabs: Why isn't Smith demanding they get barred from the park?
Carriage-haters seem to imagine the horses would otherwise roam free in fields somewhere, but now suffer horribly doing work . . . they've been bred for generations to do.
Nor is there any evidence of true, systemic mistreatment in the carriage industry — only one-off stories distorted to stir up fury.
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Last week, for example a mare named Lady died while on the way back to her stable in Hell's Kitchen, kicking off another round of outrage — when she actually died of a small tumor in her adrenal gland, not any abuse.
There's no cause to completely ban a favorite tourist activity, which is undoubtedly a draw for those record visitors Smith brags about.
The City Council shouldn't heed the high-horse panic-mongers seeking to kill a tradition that dates back nearly two centuries.
Let the horses keep clomping through Central Park.
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