NYCs horse-carriage ban shows Menins true colors and sets a scary socialist precedent

When the City Council votes Thursday on a bill to ban Central Park’s horse carriages, the decision could reverberate far beyond the industry’s workers and the fanatics who have lobbied to abolish their trade.If the vote succeeds, it will demonstrate that New York’s turn toward the radical left goes far beyond Mayor Zohran Mamdani — and that Julie Menin, the supposedly more moderate council speaker, isn’t checking Mamdani’s extremism but enabling it. It will also show that this council is uninterested in facts or data.The ban is ostensibly spurred by public peril: The council’s July hearing on the issue came just a month after a horse-carriage crash killed passenger Romanch Mahajan, an 18-year-old tourist from India. Mahajan’s death was awful — but it’s the only known instance of a human fatality in Central Park carriage history.

 The best theory of why the horse bolted is that it was shocked by stray underground voltage — a dangerous condition that the city and the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that manages the park, should have warned drivers about. Yes, the conservancy, which supports the ban, will yammer on about eight “incidents” over 13 months, including “collisions” and “injured drivers.”But it presents these numbers in a vacuum.

 If you tried to tally every comparable Central Park “incident” of a collision between cyclists, or of a pedicab operator driving illegally on pedestrian paths, you’d come up with thousands of them. One of the conservancy’s reported “incidents” was of a horse that died this year — after eating poisonous shrubs planted by the park.If we’re going to play this game, remember that a conservancy motor vehicle hit and killed Barry, the beloved barred owl, five years ago. Further, the council is ignoring facts and data on the horses themselves.The animals, benefiting from roomy stables, mandated vet checkups and vacations, are treated well.Manhattan District Attorney Alv...