Which Is When You Announce A Light Rail Initiative

Indeed, horses don’t belong in the middle of New York City traffic:

Capping what may be one of the more bewildering political debacles in recent New York memory, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s third State of the City speech was overshadowed — before he so much as delivered a word of it — by the implosion of his widely mocked, ill-supported deal to get horse carriages off New York City streets.

It was a proposal in which the mayor invested a extraordinary amount of political capital. The result has alienated, in no particular order, park advocates, council members, union leaders, community boards, real estate interests, pedicab drivers, political donors, and, ultimately, animal-rights activists.

[. . .]

The thing that makes this particular debacle so unusual isn’t that the stakes were high, but that they were so very low. All mayors lose big battles, but here was the spectacle of a mayor taking a high-profile stand on a matter of importance primarily to one of his donors, and then refusing, in defiance of his critics, allies and all political common sense, to let it go.

“They’re not humane,” he said in 2013, before he took office. “They’re not appropriate to the year 2014. It’s over. So just watch us do it now.”

And so he tried, with the staunch backing of New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets — an organization bankrolled by a wealthy real estate executive that helped knock his rival Christine Quinn out of the mayoral race.

“It always just bothered me seeing those horses,” said the executive, Steve Nislick, in an interview in 2014 about his motivations and what he wanted from the man he helped elect. “I just knew from my own experience that horses don’t belong in the middle of New York City traffic.”

Ultimately, Nislick and de Blasio settled for a compromise. The horse carriage industry would be drastically reduced and housed inside Central Park. The city would pay some $25 million to repurpose an old building for the cause. Pedicab operators would be banished from the tourist-heavy southern portion of the park. The city announced that a deal had been reached.

Then it began to fall apart. The Central Park Conservancy and surrounding community boards panned it. The editorial boards reacted with horror. The Transport Workers Union organized the pedicab drivers and promised a lawsuit. The Teamsters, who represent the drivers, agreed to support the deal, until they didn’t.

The truth is that the deal was imperiled from the outset, since so few people bought into the premise: that de Blasio was taking a principled stand on how New Yorkers treat animals, rather than forcing an entire city to live through an entirely discretionary drama in the service of settling a political debt.