Controversy over call for New York City’s horse-drawn carriages to be banned from taking tourists around Central Park

THIS century-old New York institution, a favourite among visitors, is set to be driven out of the city, the mayor has declared.

A horse drawn carriage carrying tourists passes outside Central Park in New York. Picture

MANY US cities have quintessential sights and sounds: San Francisco’s clanging cable cars, New Orleans and its raucous Mardi Gras, and Washington’s political mudslinging.

New York has an abundance of them too, and the new mayor has ignited a firestorm by announcing plans to nix one that is a century old - the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park - calling them inhumane.

In their place, if he gets his way, get ready to kick back in electric cars.

“We are going to get rid of the horse carriages. Period,” Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio said in December, one month after being elected.

“We are going to quickly and aggressively move to make horse carriages no longer a part of the landscape in New York City. They are not humane. They are not appropriate to the year 2014. It’s over.”

He did however promise to discuss things with the people who make a living from this very Big Apple tourist attraction, which involves 220 horses, 170 drivers and 68 carriages.

NYClass is one of the groups pressing to get rid of the carriages.

“New York is one of the most congested cities in the entire world. These horses are working in midtown traffic with their noses against the tail pipes,’’ the group’s Chelsie Schadt said.

“Horses don’t belong in traffic.”

The group donated $US1.3 million ($A1.44 million) to the campaigns of de Blasio and other mayoral candidates opposed to this attraction - which has been immortalised in romantic fashion in many movies.

“It is absolutely about defending animals,” said Schadt, adding that the carriages had been involved in about 20 accidents in recent years.

“Horses are not like people. They need daily turning out, time every day to behave like a horse, pasture-grazing and socialising with other horses..

“They go from the confines of their stalls to the streets of New York City, back to their stalls.”

So nerves are on edge at the stables housing the horses.

Conor McHugh, the husky manager of the Clinton Park Stables on 52nd Street, gladly opens up the facility, built in 1860, for a tour.

On the ground floor are the carriages themselves, adorned with plastic flowers and American flags. In the basement, pedicabs are lined up. And upstairs are the horses, 79 of them, each in its own stall measuring three metres by 2.4 metres.

McHugh shows off the water troughs, the hay, and the sprinkler system in case there is a fire.

He explains that all the horses that take people for rides in Central Park must spend at least five weeks a year on a farm and cannot work more than nine hours a day, from the time they leave the stable until they get back.

They also can’t toil in temperatures above 32C or below minus 7C.

“People who are against our business keep insisting that our horses never see time on the farm, or never get to run in the fields and never get to be, according to them, a horse,” McHugh said.

But “by law, they have to do all of those things”.

Schadt counters that even if there are rules to protect the horses, “there is simply no way you can regulate that industry to make it truly humane.”

So NYClass wants to replace the carriages with electric-powered copies of early 20th-century cars to offer that same “nostalgic feel”.

The horses would be retired to “sanctuaries” and looked after by the people who drove the carriages.

The first prototype of the cars, at a cost of $US450,000 ($A499,000), could be ready in the spring.

The project needs the approval of the city council but is not yet on the agenda.

The carriages would be phased out and the electric cars phased in over a period of three years.