NEW YORK TIMES: The mayor’s plan to ban horse-drawn carriages, an obscure proposal until [Mayor Bill] de Blasio embraced it in last year’s mayoral race, has erupted into a cause célèbre, landing on the cover of The New Yorker and dominating local headlines, even as Mr. de Blasio is trying to refocus his administration on housing and wage issues…
As The Daily News ratcheted up a campaign to keep the horse carriages, with day after day of front-page headlines, Mr. de Blasio did little to respond, declining to provide details about how his team would go about closing the industry…
“The horse carriages have reached the point where they have the potential to divert the mayoral agenda, and that’s the one thing you don’t want to have happen,” said Mitchell Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University… (more)
EDITOR: Banning horse drawn carriages is foolish. The horses are well tended to, have a cushy job, and even get weeks of grazing in the country every summer.
If the argument is that it is dangerous for them and others when they travel on city streets to their stable some half a dozen blocks away, then, as suggested, build stables in Central Park and pay for them with proceeds from the sale of the current stables on very valuable downtown real estate.
De Blasio should learn a lesson to what happened to the all powerful Robert Moses when he tried to take down a few trees in Central Park to create a parking lot for The Tavern on the Green.
Lets see ….. if the horses are not allowed to work in the park the owner of the stables will no longer have an income. He will be forced to sell his property cheap and developers will then build expensive profitable condos in midtown !
Check into the groups who donated money to [de Mateos] campaign and also donated money against Quinn.
Find out who sold the horses to work in the park and if they are Amish horses they are on vacation!
It’s about money, not horses, being over worked.