New York Abolishes Carriage Horses and Strands Their Drivers

When the New York City Council voted 40 to 7 on Thursday, October 22, to enact Int. No. 943-A-2026, it resolved a municipal dispute that has simmered since horse-drawn carriages first entered Central Park in 1858. The legislation, known as Romanch’s Law, immediately halts new carriage licenses and imposes a hard ban on commercial horse operations on city streets after June 1, 2028. For animal welfare advocates and city leaders who have spent decades watching draft horses navigate Manhattan traffic, the outcome felt overdue. Yet the statutory mechanism chosen to achieve it exposes a persistent flaw in how modern municipal government manages structural change: the council outlawed a regulated trade by fiat while treating the working people who hold its permits as an administrative footnote.

The catalyst for the measure was immediate and horrifying. On June 17, 2026, Romanch Mahajan, an eighteen-year-old visitor from India, suffered fatal head injuries after being thrown from a runaway carriage drawn by a horse named Samson inside Central Park. The tragedy followed the collapse of another carriage horse, Deniz, during an early summer heat wave on June 9. Within weeks, Mahajan’s family filed administrative notices of claim against four separate municipal agencies, alleging decades of negligent oversight. Council leaders dusted off a measure previously drafted as Ryder’s Law—named after an elderly horse that collapsed on Ninth Avenue in 2022—renamed it in Mahajan’s memory, and pushed it across the floor. Speaker Julie Menin defended the bill as a vital public safety reckoning, noting that the park now absorbs more than forty-two million visitors each year, packing drives with high-speed electric bicycles, motorized scooters, runners, and pedestrians.

Menin and the bill’s primary sponsor, Council Member Christopher Marte, made the traditional case for municipal progress. In their rendering, urban density and extreme climate events have simply outstripped a nineteenth-century trade. Animal protection organizations, including the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, pledged outside resources to place the roughly 180 working horses in verified rural sanctuaries, ensuring that none are shipped to slaughter. A twenty-month runway between now and the summer of 2028, the council argued, affords the city ample time to coordinate workforce counseling and general job retraining. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Thursday that he intends to sign the measure into law.

The officials’ rationale is coherent as far as it goes. Dense traffic, surging summer temperatures, and forty-ton commercial trucks make horse-drawn transit on city asphalt anachronistic and often perilous. What is structurally unsound, however, is the mechanism the council used to retire it. Rather than enacting a formal buyback of the operating assets it spent decades encouraging workers to purchase, the city council passed a regulatory prohibition that leaves compensation entirely to chance.

For the roughly two hundred drivers, stable workers, and small operators represented by Transport Workers Union Local 100, the vote looks less like humane reform than uncompensated confiscation. Carriage medallions are municipal permits created and regulated by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. Drivers, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, took out private loans and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy them. Francesco Riccobono, an owner-operator who joined a boisterous union picket outside City Hall on Thursday, put the grievance plainly: he invested $400,000 two years ago to expand his father’s dream. Now that investment is set to become legally worthless on a specific date set by the city.

Romanch’s Law instructs the mayoral administration to devise an industry transition plan during 2027, but the legislation appropriates zero dollars to fund it. It establishes no floor on severance, provides no statutory buyout formula for medallions, and offers no replacement capital for stable owners. As TWU International President John Samuelsen pointed out after the vote, the statutory language consists entirely of nonbinding aspirations. “There’s a bunch of what trade unionists would call ‘supposals’ in the bill,” Samuelsen said. “There’s no guarantees. . . . It is not progressive. It is anti-worker. It’s theft.” The union has already retained former council member Ben Kallos to challenge the law in federal court under the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause.

The institutional irony here is that the carriage industry’s physical friction was exacerbated by decades of municipal neglect. In floor debate on Thursday, Council Member Jim Gennaro noted that the city’s official animal inspectors at the Department of Health and the NYPD Mounted Unit have consistently affirmed the horses’ routine veterinary care. What failed was the built environment. For decades, carriage drivers asked for dedicated, shaded hitching stations, plumbed water troughs, and separated curb cuts along Central Park South to keep animals out of traffic lanes and protect them from extreme heat. The Central Park Conservancy and the Department of Parks and Recreation routinely rebuffed those requests, preferring pristine sightlines to basic operational infrastructure. Having starved the trade of the urban physical plant needed to operate safely, the city has now cited the resulting hazards to shutter it entirely.

When a society determines that an industry has outlived its civic purpose, sound public administration requires managing the transition equitably. When democratic governments decommission coal plants, phase out polluting vehicle fleets, or consolidate rail corridors, the first rule of functional governance is to make the affected workers whole through funded buyouts, direct pension guarantees, and negotiated structural transfers. That principle is what distinguishes an intentional public transition from an arbitrary regulatory seizure.

By passing the ban first and leaving the financial mechanisms to an unfunded interagency working group next year, the city council chose the easiest political path. It delivered a visible victory to an energized animal welfare coalition while offloading the tangible material cost onto a tiny, politically vulnerable workforce. If New York wants to demonstrate that it can modernize its public spaces humanely, the Mamdani administration will need to correct that imbalance before the ink dries. Phasing out the carriages may well reflect the realities of a crowded, warming metropolis; doing so on the backs of two hundred working families is simply poor governance.