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Just as Other Places Have Done, New York City Can Preserve Jobs and Tradition with Electric ‘Horseless’ Carriages


horse carriage rides

Horse carriage ride (photo: @shinyasuzuki)


Flashback to the 2013 New York City mayor’s race where one front-and-center issue that ultimately helped propel Bill de Blasio to City Hall was whether to ban horse-drawn carriages in New York City. Eight years later, not much has changed except for little to no attention on the issue in the 2021 mayor’s race. As long-time horse advocates, we believe this business to be inhumane and dangerous — both for the horses and the public — particularly in a congested city like New York.

We’ve long wanted to see the end of the urban carriage horse trade. However, one key thing did change between 2013 and now and that is innovation. There is now a new alternative that would preserve this long-time New York City tourist tradition, including the jobs that come with it, while protecting the wellbeing of the horses and the public.

The question we asked ourselves is how could we achieve a similar effect as an outright ban, but also get the drivers and their union to agree it would be beneficial for all? To find the answer, we turned to our friends across the border and to what a growing number of cities around the world are starting to implement in electric-powered carriages. 

In August 2019, we traveled to Guadalajara, Mexico on a fact-finding mission to learn about the new electric carriages replacing the longtime horse carriages in that city. Two years earlier, Enrique Alfaro Ramírez, the mayor of Guadalajara at the time, signed a law to ban the horse carriages, stating, “we cannot continue to mistake the idea of tradition with animal abuse.” We were impressed with what we saw in this lovely, historic, global city – the second largest in Mexico and one of its most important cultural centers. 

At the time of our visit the transition was halfway complete and we talked to several drivers operating the electric carriages. They told us how much they enjoyed the experience; how their income was much higher; how they did not have to worry about their horses’ upkeep; or the disapproving public – something all carriage drivers deal with in a very controversial business. With the assistance of a local attorney who also runs an animal protection organization, all the horses were placed in good homes. 

We returned to New York eager to share what we learned and to start a serious dialogue about this exciting new option -- to reimagine New York City with electric carriages. Unfortunately, the pandemic brought everything to a screeching halt, including the city’s tourism industry with many cultural institutions, restaurants, and hotels forced to close and nearly $5 billion in local tax revenue gone.

3 img 5209As tourists slowly trickle back to New York City as we approach the summer season, we have an opportunity to build back better, which includes exploring a renewed industry of electric carriages that will not only save existing jobs but create new ones. And we are starting to see a worldwide movement. 

In addition to Guadalajara, electric carriage rides are offered in Mumbai, India; Cologne, Germany; and Dubai, UAE, to name a few. Some cities have outright banned the trade, eliminating the horse carriages with no replacement alternative, including Salt Lake City, Chicago, and Asheville in the U.S. and international cities including Barcelona , Old San Juan, and Montreal. 

New York City could become the first U.S. city to make this shift as responsible and compassionate tourism has evolved and people become increasingly concerned about the commercialized use of animals in tourist entertainment, like what we see around Central Park. In early 2020, a carriage horse named Aysha collapsed in Central Park and later died. Another horse collapsed in the park in December but was forced to get up and continue to work. These disturbing incidents, two examples of many, are a black mark on the business and the city. A horse in congested and chaotic traffic is a horse at risk. It does not have to be this way. 

As with Guadalajara, electric carriages will need wide-ranging support and we recognize this isn’t a change overnight. The newly-elected mayor, the new City Council speaker and Council, the unions, business community, and all the key players would need to come together next year. But we should be talking about it right now.

In Guadalajara, no one thought this was possible, but after much work and negotiations, what once seemed impossible became a win-win for all involved. We know many things will need to be worked out, including how the evolution is funded; new regulations to allow the electric carriages to operate; installing charging stations; and determining where the carriages would be parked overnight – and developing a plan to ensure that the horses are placed in sanctuaries or good homes. 

But it’s all doable. New York is a city of endless possibilities and opportunity. We just need the will to implement a viable alternative that improves the quality of life for all, while preserving the business in a different form. Come January, we hope the next mayor seizes that opportunity. 

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Elizabeth Forel & Susan Wagner are Co-Founders- Committee for Compassionate & Responsible Tourism.

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We Passed Outdoor Dining Into Law, Now We Must Improve It


open restaurants post

Ourdoor dining (photo: @nycgov)


In March of 2020, COVID-19 brought the pulse of our vibrant city to a devastating halt. New Yorkers were directed to stay in their homes, subways shut down and buses cleared out, offices closed, small businesses shuttered, and the vibrant action stopped in the restaurants that are so essential to our culture and quality of life.

Now, I may be biased, but I believe that Brooklyn has some of the best food options the city has to offer -- and some of the hardest working service workers, too! So when businesses in our communities reached out for urgent relief while the pandemic raged, I sponsored and passed legislation for outdoor dining to be allowed all across New York City. 

It worked. Restaurants expanded onto our sidewalks and into our streets. Relieved owners received a newfound ability to serve customers in a safe manner after months of lost revenue. Residents were delighted to leave their homes and apartments, helping to relieve cabin fever and offering a glimmer of “normalcy.” Kitchen and wait staff had work. We also found an amazing opportunity to reimagine our streetscape, reclaiming precious sidewalk and street space for New Yorkers — building community and providing an economic lifeline. 

The outdoor dining program saved countless restaurants from bankruptcy while creating more space for residents to enjoy our street life, lifting the spirit of our city in an otherwise dark period. As we emerge from this pandemic, outdoor dining is a successful program we should keep, not just for our neighborhoods, but for all the small businesses still fighting to survive. With the obvious benefits for employers, employees, and our city as a whole, it deserves to keep going, especially if we learn from past lessons and make key improvements. 

We must make the program more accessible to small businesses in every corner of our city by increasing educational outreach, providing technical assistance so businesses are set up for success, and streamlining the cure process for infractions. 

From the taquerias and dim sum restaurants of Sunset Park to the roti shops in Flatbush, what makes New York City’s restaurant scene so tantalizing is its diversity. We need to ensure that restaurant owners in outer-borough communities of color -- those neighborhoods hit hardest by the pandemic -- have the tools necessary to successfully utilize the outdoor dining program. We can do this by increasing targeted, multilingual, educational outreach about the program and how to use it. Encouraging more restaurants to participate not only helps the individual businesses, but will also uplift communities that have suffered the most during this pandemic. Increased outdoor dining will attract more customers to locally owned businesses and create more vibrant outdoor spaces, powering neighborhood recoveries.

Getting an outdoor dining program up and running at a restaurant is just one piece of the puzzle. We also need to make it easier for restaurants to successfully use the program. This means ensuring that technical assistance and support is readily available. Let’s set businesses up for success by equipping restaurant owners and workers with knowledge about how to set up a safe and compliant outdoor dining space and avoid fines. While several agencies are able to levy fines, information about how to avoid and cure violations should be easily accessible from one central source and available in all languages. Restaurant owners and workers need to spend this time making their businesses successful, not navigating a needlessly complex bureaucracy of city government in order to avoid being fined. 

As we begin to emerge from pandemic restrictions, we have to look back and assess our government’s response to the challenges we faced. We can be proud of what we did with outdoor dining, creating a policy that extended a critical lifeline to our residents, reimagined how our streets and sidewalks could be used, and provided our neighbors with a safe and much-needed escape in a time of great isolation. 

Moving forward, we need to make sure that the program becomes permanent and harness its benefits while improving access and usability so that all small business owners can take advantage of this opportunity as we recover. Our restaurants have intersectional relationships with our communities, creating jobs, particularly for immigrant communities, serving as local gathering spaces, and giving hard-working New Yorkers a place to blow off steam. I want to build on this creativity and excitement, and if elected Brooklyn Borough President I will continue to explore innovative solutions that open up our public spaces in ways that benefit all Brooklynites.

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City Council Member Antonio Reynoso represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens. On Twitter @CMReynoso34.

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New York Voters Face Sharply Reduced Choices in Future Elections


crowds gathered votes

Voting (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office)


In April 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo virtually forced the New York legislature to make severe changes to New York’s ballot access laws, by inserting those changes into a budget bill, which had to pass in order to avoid chaos. If those changes are not reversed, New York voters will invariably see only two candidates on their general election ballots in 2022 for almost all congressional and statewide races. In 2024, for president, chances are also high that they will see only the Democratic and Republican nominees on the November ballot.

One change increased the petition for statewide office from 15,000 to 45,000 signatures required to appear on the ballot. However, for 2020 only, Governor Andrew Cuomo reduced it to 30,000 signatures by executive order due to the pandemic. Even with that reduction, not one statewide independent petition succeeded in 2020. In the entire history of New York’s government-printed ballots, which originated in 1890, this was only the second time when not one statewide petition succeeded in a presidential or gubernatorial election year. The only other instance was in 1956, when the only two groups that tried, the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Workers Party, had their statewide petitions challenged and rejected.

In the spring of 1992, when Ross Perot was starting to run for president as an independent, the New York petition requirement was 20,000 signatures. Although Perot was very popular in the national polls, and was rapidly getting on the ballot in all the other states, New York legislators were concerned that Perot would not be able to get on the ballot in New York. So they eased the petition requirement, to 15,000 signatures. The bills that made that liberalizing change, S7922 and A11505, were obviously motivated to avoid the embarrassment of Perot getting on the ballot in all states except New York, because the effective date for the reduction in signatures for other statewide office was set in 1993, but the reduction for president went into effect the day the bill was signed. Governor Mario Cuomo signed the bill on May 8, 1992. Perot did then get on the ballot in New York and all other states.

If the 1992 session of the legislature had a plausible fear that 20,000 signatures was too difficult for someone as popular as Ross Perot, it makes no sense that Governor Andrew Cuomo chose 45,000 for future statewide petitions, unless he desired to block all future statewide independent petitions.

The severity of the statewide petition increase was not obvious in 2020, because New York already had eight ballot-qualified parties. The Libertarian, Green, and Independence Parties were each free to nominate someone for president without a petition, and did so. Therefore, New York voters had five candidates for president on the general election ballots: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Jo Jorgensen (Libertarian), Howie Hawkins (Green), and Brock Pierce (independent). The SAM Party, which was also on the ballot, chose not to have a presidential nominee. The Working Families Party listed Biden; the Conservative Party listed Trump.

But, the 2020 ballot access change had another provision, increasing the requirements for a group to meet the definition of a ballot-qualified political party. It increased that definition so severely that four of New York’s parties are no longer automatically on the ballot. If they want to run in 2022 and future years, they will first need to get 45,000 valid signatures for their top-of-ticket nominee. To put the difficulty of getting 45,000 signatures in perspective, note that in 2020, not one independent candidate, and not one minor party, successfully completed any petition anywhere in the nation that exceeded 5,000 signatures, for any office. Granted, petitioning in 2020 was especially difficult due to the covid health crisis.

Defenders of the new definition of “political party,” a group that polled at least 2% for the office at the top of the ticket every two years, in gubernatorial and presidential elections, argue that the Working Families and Conservative Parties meet the new definition, so that New Yorkers will still have four parties to choose from. But in New York, the Working Families Party has never, in its 23-year history, nominated anyone for statewide office who was not the Democratic nominee. For the U.S. House, the Working Families Party also almost never runs anyone other than the Democratic nominee. In 2020 it had only one nominee for U.S. House who was not also the Democratic nominee, and that was an unintended accident, and if the Working Families Party had won in court, even that one nominee would have been replaced by the Democratic nominee.

The Conservative Party generally nominates the Republican nominee. For president, it has never nominated anyone who was not also the Republican nominee. For other statewide offices, it has not run someone who was not the Republican nominee since the U.S. Senate race in 2004. For the U.S. House, it almost always nominates the Republican nominee. In 2020, there were only two districts in which it ran someone against the Republican nominees. Therefore, the presence on the ballot of the Conservative and Working Families Parties barely adds to the list of candidates.

In 2020, in the U.S. House races, 17 of New York’s 27 races had at least three candidates on the ballot, but that was almost entirely due to the fact that the Libertarian, Green, and SAM Parties had their own nominees. Without those parties on the ballot in future elections, virtually every U.S. House race, and the vast majority of state legislative races, will have only the Democratic and Republican nominees on the ballot.

New York has been one of the states with the most third party and independent choices on the ballot for its entire history, and New Yorkers have been the voters most likely to elect such a candidate to Congress, compared to the voters of the other states. Individuals who were not Democratic or Republican nominees were elected to Congress from New York in 1947, 1948, 1949, and 1970. In the last 100 years, no other state can match that level of political diversity in congressional elections. If New York wants to keep its storied political diversity, the ballot access changes of 2020 must be reversed.

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Richard Winger is the publisher of Ballot Access News.

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