In a tragedy so absurd it could only be scripted by a tone-deaf city planner with a fondness for manure, a teenage tourist has been killed in a New York carriage crash. The accident, which occurred when a spooked horse bolted through midtown traffic, has reignited the eternal debate: why, in the year of our Lord 2024, does Manhattan still allow horse-drawn carriages to clatter through its streets like a Dickensian fever dream?
The victim, a 17-year-old visitor from Ohio, was taking a selfie when the carriage overturned near Central Park. The horse, presumably fed up with smelling taxi fumes and being photographed by tourists who think they’re in a Jane Austen novel, panicked and charged. The result: a twisted wreck of Victorian nostalgia and a grieving family who now understand that the ‘romance’ of a horse-drawn ride comes with a side of arterial bleeding.
This is not an isolated incident. Last year, three horses collapsed from heat exhaustion. The year before, a carriage tipped over on Fifth Avenue, sending a Japanese couple flying into a newsstand. But the city’s carriage lobby, a coalition of Amish cosplayers and men who call themselves ‘breeders’ with a straight face, insists that these noble animals are ‘part of New York’s heritage.’ Actually, my dear, so is smallpox. We got rid of that too.
The mayor, a man whose moral compass is calibrated by campaign donations, has offered the usual platitudes: ‘Our hearts go out to the family’ and ‘We will review safety protocols.’ Translation: ‘We will form a task force that will meet for three years, issue a milquetoast report, and then do nothing while more tourists become organic speed bumps.’
Meanwhile, the solution sits in plain sight: electric carriages. Silent, clean, incapable of being startled by a rogue pigeon or a cabbie’s curse. But no, we must preserve the ‘charm’ of a 19th-century transportation method that requires a living creature to haul two-tonne wagons through gridlock. Charm is a funny thing. It’s what you call a thing when you don’t have to clean up its excrement.
Of course, the carriage union will argue, as they always do, that these horses are ‘treated like family.’ So is Aunt Marge, but we don’t strap her to a hansom cab and send her into the Holland Tunnel during rush hour. The horses live in cramped stables, breathe exhaust fumes all day, and are one backfiring lorry away from a cardiac arrest. But their eyes are so pretty! And they make such lovely clip-clop sounds!
The truth is that New York’s horse-drawn carriage industry is a vanity project for nostalgia addicts who want to pretend the city is still a gaslit wonderland. It is not. It is a steel-and-concrete maw that consumes everything, especially soft organic creatures that don’t belong on its streets. The only wild horses in Manhattan should be the ones on the stock exchange ticker.
So let us canonise this teenager not with a memorial but with action. Ban the carriages. Replace them with electric replicas that won’t buck when a skateboarder passes. Make the city safer for both two-legged and four-legged creatures. Otherwise, the only legacy of this tragedy will be another chapter in New York’s long history of doing the wrong thing until it kills someone.
Clip-clop. Splat. Silence.
