There is a sound that has belonged to Central Park South for as long as anyone alive can remember — the hollow clop of shod hooves on asphalt, keeping time under the taxi horns. Tourists film it. Postcards sell it. Movies use it as shorthand for romance, for old New York, for the city at its most cinematic. And for most of us, most of the time, the horse making that sound has been closer to scenery than to someone: a living prop, harnessed to a story we tell about ourselves.
On Thursday, October 22nd, the New York City Council voted to end it. Romanch’s Law — Intro. 943, carried by Council Member Christopher Marte — passed 40 to 7, a veto-proof majority. No licenses will be issued or renewed; the ones that exist expire on May 31, 2028; and on June 1, 2028, the horse-drawn carriage comes off the streets of this city. By June 1, 2027, every owner of a licensed horse must certify to the Health Department that the animal will not be sold for slaughter, or into another carriage business, or for any other inhumane purpose. The administration owes the drivers a workforce transition plan. Mayor Mamdani, who reached the deal with Speaker Julie Menin earlier this month, put it as plainly as anyone has: “The horse carriage industry is coming to an end in New York City.”
So let me be plain, too. This is a good law, and New York should be proud of it. This is the fourth essay I have written about this fight since April — once when it looked hopelessly stuck, once when Deniz went down on West Drive, and once when Romanch Mahajan, eighteen years old, was killed when a runaway carriage overturned near Tavern on the Green. Each of those essays ended with some version of the same request. Pass the law. On Thursday, the Council passed it. Credit belongs to Marte, who refused to let the bill stay dead; to Speaker Menin, who brought it to the floor; to the mayor; to NYCLASS and the advocates who kept this alive through nearly two decades of failed bills; and to the Mahajan family, who turned the worst afternoon of their lives into a demand that no other family live it. Well done, New York.
It is worth asking, though, why it took so long — because the reasons say something about how all of us decide which animals count. Bills to end the trade have been introduced since 2007, and every one of them failed. The welfare argument did not change much in those years. Horses are prey animals, built for open ground and for flight, and the job asked them to stand in Midtown exhaust, walk on pavement that punishes their joints, and stay calm beside buses. That case was made long ago. What changed in 2026 was not the argument. It was that the argument acquired faces.
Psychologists have a name for this. People respond far more generously to a single, identifiable victim than to statistics about many — and, strikingly, prompting people to think analytically about the numbers can dampen the sympathy a named victim evokes (Small et al., 2007). For years the case against the carriages was a case about averages: heat thresholds, working hours, incident counts. Then it had names. Ryder, collapsing on Ninth Avenue in August 2022. Deniz, dead on West Drive on June 9th. And then Romanch, eight days later. Speaker Menin has said that his death was, to her, “a breaking point.” Indeed, the law itself now wears his name.
I want to sit with one uncomfortable part of that. It took a human death to move what horse deaths had not. That is not a criticism of anyone on the Council so much as an honest description of where most of us draw the line. Research on moral expansiveness finds that people vary a great deal in how far outward they extend moral concern, and that animals tend to sit nearer the boundary than humans do (Crimston et al., 2016). Species membership carries moral weight in our judgments even beyond what we believe an animal can feel or think — the pattern of speciesism (Caviola et al., 2019). And horses occupy an especially strange spot on that map. Depending on where you stand, a horse is a companion, an athlete, a laborer, a symbol, or, in some countries, dinner (Amiot & Bastian, 2015). The carriage horse was the purest example of that in-between status — loved in the photograph, used in practice. A city that adored the image never had to look closely at the animal.
Now, the strongest case on the other side deserves its best hearing, because it is not a frivolous one. By their union’s count, roughly 150 active drivers hold the city’s 68 carriage medallions, working about 180 horses. Many have spent decades in the trade. Some paid real money for a medallion, and they were told, by this city, that it was a legitimate business. TWU Local 100 has called the transition provisions “a plan to draft a plan” and has promised to see the city in court. And I have no doubt that many drivers love their horses — that the grief they expressed for Deniz was real. The best version of their argument runs something like this: a regulated trade, with rules on temperature, hours, and rest, sustaining working-class livelihoods and a 168-year tradition, has been ended by people who will not bear its cost.
Part of that is simply right, and advocates should say so before anyone else does. The workers deserve a real transition, not a vague one. The law requires the administration to build a program — job referrals, counseling, training, education — and to consider compensation for the medallions and businesses that are being retired. To the extent that the city treats those commitments as an afterthought, it will have done this the wrong way, and those of us who cheered the vote should be the loudest in holding it to them. A just ending is part of a good ending.
But notice what the counterargument presupposes: that the only question is whether these particular horses were treated kindly within the job. The question was always the job itself. You cannot train the startle reflex out of a half-ton flight animal, and no regulation, however conscientious, changes what traffic, asphalt, and crowds are. The care can be real and the premise still wrong. At bottom, this was an exploitative arrangement — not because the people in it were cruel, but because an animal with no say was put to work, for life, in the service of a postcard. And “tradition,” as I wrote in June, is a description, not a justification. This city has retired plenty of traditions. It is better for having done so.
It is worth being measured about scale, too. Roughly 180 horses is a small number beside the billions of animals moving through our food system every year, and a carriage ban will not, by itself, change how this city eats. Nor does the law build a pasture. It forbids the slaughterhouse but does not create a sanctuary program; NYCLASS and others have pledged to help place the horses, and that work now has a deadline. The mayor still has to sign — though with forty votes, the outcome is no longer in doubt — and the union has promised a lawsuit.
And yet laws do more than regulate. They teach. Legal scholars have long described the expressive function of law: beyond what it compels, a statute announces what a community values, and that announcement shapes norms in ways enforcement alone never could (Sunstein, 1996). Social psychology says something similar from the other direction. People track what they believe others think, and institutional signals — a court ruling, a legislative vote — shift those perceptions, and behavior follows them (Tankard & Paluck, 2016). A child visiting New York in 2029 will learn Central Park without the carriage line on 59th Street. She will not have to be talked out of a romance with the carriage, because no one will have sold it to her. What New York said on Thursday, in effect, is that a horse is not scenery. That sentence will travel further than the roughly 180 horses it frees.
So where does that leave us? With work, mostly. The horses need homes, and good ones, before June 2028. The drivers need the city to keep its word. And the Council’s new Animal Welfare Caucus has other priority bills still pending — among them the end of bird sales in city pet shops, and the future of Patty, the Bronx Zoo’s last elephant. The same logic that retired the carriage reaches them, too: an animal is someone, not something we arranged for our enjoyment.
In June I wrote that the memorial that would actually mean something for Romanch Mahajan was “an empty stable and a law that carries his name.” As of Thursday, we have the law. The empty stable comes next — emptied the right way, with every horse retired to grass and every worker given a fair road out. Thank your Council member if they voted yes. Then keep going.