De Blasio’s New Horse-Carriage Plan Is Even More Ridiculous
Mayor de Blasio’s affordable-housing plan is in shambles. There’s traffic chaos in the streets. Sixty percent of New Yorkers say they see more homeless people around. And 48 percent of New Yorkers don’t want de Blasio to have a second term.
“It was a measure of how depressing the 2013 election was that neither of de Blasio’s conservative opponents stuck up for private-sector jobs in an already well-regulated industry.”
So what does the mayor do? He races back into the arms of the special interests who helped get him elected. That’s right — he’s re-embracing the nuts who want to ban the Central Park carriage horses.
This time, he isn’t looking to ban the carriage horses — he’s got an even crazier idea.
You may remember de Blasio’s odd pledge in the summer of 2013. He said at a debate sponsored by radical animal-rights activists that he’d get rid of the 220 horses — and the 300 human jobs that go with them — on “Day One.”
The then-wannabe mayor had no factual case for a horse ban. The horses live a good life in airy stables on the Far West Side of Manhattan and are living under strict conditions that prohibit, for example, working in extreme temperatures. No city inspector, vet, reporter or activist has ever found abuse.
The mayor and his supporters also insisted that other global cities have banned carriages. Sorry: You can go to London, Paris or Amsterdam and see the horses clop-cloppeting along on those cities’ historic streets just as on ours.
But the mayor did have a political case: The people behind NYCLASS gave nearly $2 million to his 2013 campaign and to negative-ad campaigns against his opponents, and now to his new “nonpolitical” slush fund.
It was a measure of how depressing the 2013 election was that neither of de Blasio’s conservative opponents stuck up for private-sector jobs in an already well-regulated industry.
That was then, this is now — and the mayor’s been in office for nearly two years. He has been pretty quiet on horse carriages for much of that time.
Those of us inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on his many missteps because he is new to this job figured this was a good sign: The mayor had wisely noticed the facts here, noticed that the public supports the horses and their handlers and noticed that the City Council isn’t particularly interested in voting to gut middle-class jobs for no reason.
Nope. Turns out the mayor was spending this time thinking up an even wackier anti-horse scheme.
Now de Blasio wants to reduce the number of horses to 70, and stable the horses in Central Park rather than having them commute from the West Side.
This makes no sense on at least three levels.
First, if the horses are so horrifically abused, why is it better to abuse 70 horses instead of 220? After all, no one ever says that we should reduce, say, the number of trafficked or forced prostitutes. The goal is zero. The answer here is that the animals aren’t abused, and the mayor well knows it.
“If the horses are so horrifically abused, why is it better to abuse 70 horses instead of 220? After all, no one ever says that we should reduce, say, the number of trafficked or forced prostitutes. The goal is zero.”
Second, if the streets are so unsafe for the horses that they can’t go back and forth 11 blocks to the park, that’s a problem with the streets, not with the horses — and the answer is better traffic safety to protect drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists, too.
The answer here is the same: The streets really aren’t unsafe for horses. Transportation economist Charles Komanoff ran some numbers and found that horses have fewer crashes than taxis do in the same Midtown area.
Third, why on earth would we give part of our precious public park to house a private business? Central Park doesn’t have room to stable 70 horses — and there’s no need for it. Where would a horse stable go — and who, exactly, among the park’s users would like to give up a playground or some green space?
Like many of the mayor’s ideas, from building a new subway on Utica Avenue when we don’t have money for the old subways, or building housing over a rail yard that’s going to be part of a complex MTA construction project for years to come, nobody thought this through.
The mayor has said that he wants to do something about the horses to show, as the Times put it, that he is “a man of his word.”
But sometimes real leadership is changing your mind.
This piece originally appeared in the New York Post.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post