BY ROBERT HORNAK | rahornak@gmail.com
Calls to ban horse drawn carriages used to pull tourists around Central Park are not new. The time may finally have come for NYC to make the move to electric carriages.
Carriage rides through the park are as old as the park itself. Ever since the park opened in 1858, riding through the park in a horse drawn carriage was the fashionable way to see this incredible urban oasis.
Of course, the wealthy had their own carriages. Working class people would take carriage rides for hire, forcing the City Council to allow carriage operators to work on Sunday, typically the working man’s only day off at that time, and led to the Council allowing the carriages to park at the entrance at Sixth Ave and 59th Street.
This has been the norm ever since, with carriage operators making a living offering an experience rather than just a ride. And as cars took over the streets, they provided rides for people needing to get around the city. But for those looking for an experience, horse drawn carriages have remained.
And there’s no doubt that humans have had a long and strong relationship with horses. They were used in farming since humans first started to work the land and in battle since humans first engaged in warfare. They helped Europeans settle the new world. Then they helped Americans settle the west. They helped build America’s farms and ranches.
However, other than the Amish, nobody still uses them for transportation. And outside of farms and fields, nobody uses them for work. Except the horse drawn carriage industry.
While there is great nostalgia for these throwbacks to another time (yes, simpler in some ways, but not in many others), there is no need to keep these magnificent animals working long days, often in brutal weather conditions, with little downtime during their shift.
In recent years, we have seen a number of incidents that have brought attention to the industry, and not in a good way. Some horses have collapsed while working. Some have been spooked and injured themselves, their passengers, or passersby.
In an effort to limit the horses exposure to car traffic and hoping to avoid the 20 collisions carriages were involved in in the past two years, the area bordering the park on Central Park South, where the carriages used to line up and wait for a fare, was moved in 2019 to inside different park entrances and boarding on the street was prohibited.
Naturally, the reaction from the industry was not a happy one. Complaints ranged from the size of the space designated for boarding to the incline of the road the horses were forced to stand on.
Many cities across the U.S. have already banned horse drawn carriages or are debating doing so, including cities with strong horse cultures like Dallas and Austin. In Dallas, there is only one company operating inside the city, with only five carriage permits. The company only operates from Thursday to Sunday and averages six to twelve a night. That’s a fraction of the approximately 200 carriages operating mostly full-time in NYC.
Electric carriages are very attractive, coming in a variety of styles, and have batteries that can run many trips around the park. They don’t smell, don’t bite, and act like machines instead of unpredictable animals. And where the horses are banned from working when it gets above 90 degrees, electric carriages can operate regardless of the temperature.
The time has come to stop treating these magnificent animals like beasts of burden and literally put them out to pasture. There is a better, safer, and more charming way for this industry to move into the future.
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously worked for the NYC office of the Republican Assembly Leader and served as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @roberthornak on X.
