The New York City Council voted Thursday to ban horse-drawn carriage rides by June 2028, passing Romanch's Law — named for 18-year-old Romanch Mahajan, killed this summer when he was ejected from a runaway carriage in Central Park. The legislation clears the way for a complete shutdown of the industry while calling for a transition plan for affected workers and business owners to be developed by 2027. The vote followed a chaotic day at City Hall. The council's health committee cleared the ban six-to-three before the full floor vote. Outside, carriage drivers and Transport Workers Union Local 100 members rallied against the decision, with one protester hoisting an actual bag of horse manure. Their core complaint is not abstract: the bill's worker-protection language says "consideration will be given" to retraining, which TWU president John Samuelsen called "utterly false" as a real plan. "There's nothing concrete at all," he said. The financial stakes are real and concentrated. Dozens of carriage medallions — some held by immigrant families across generations — face potential worthlessness. The industry claims more than 100,000 rides annually and a meaningful role in the city's tourism economy. Second-generation driver Conner McHugh accused Mayor Zohran Mamdani of being "as phoney as a $3 bill" for championing workers rhetorically while moving to eliminate their livelihoods without direct consultation. McHugh also alleged a broader pattern of intimidation against carriage operators, including reports to ICE and the IRS, social media harassment, and animal-rights volunteers creating unsafe situations in Central Park. He tied the ban to rezoning interests in Manhattan where horse stables are located — a claim that, if substantiated, would reframe the ban as real-estate extraction dressed as animal welfare. The animal welfare case is not baseless. Several horse deaths since 2020, including animals collapsing while pulling carriages, have fueled campaigner concerns. Mahajan's death gave the movement the political catalyst it needed. But the speed of the legislative response — from mayoral agreement to council vote in weeks — left no room for the kind of negotiated transition that would make the ban defensible as policy rather than just gesture. Donald Trump weighed in on Truth Social, calling the ban the loss of "a Great Tradition" and drawing a comparison to car accidents in Central Park that don't result in banning cars. The analogy is imprecise but the underlying point — that a single fatal incident is driving the elimination of an entire regulated industry — is a legitimate policy question that the council chose not to wrestle with in public. The TWU has announced it will pursue federal legal action, arguing the legislation unlawfully deprives carriage owners of operating licenses and medallions built over decades. Mayor Mamdani has stated that "workers and owners are protected and the horses are safe," but the gap between that sentence and an actual funded transition program is where the politics of this story will be decided over the next three years.
