This week, Bill de Blasio reiterated he’s not open to any arguments against shutting down the city’s horse-carriage trade. The mayor said he’d traveled his own journey to his position, and saw “a lot of other cities around the world” have banned the horse carriages.
When we asked him to name those cities, his office sent us the following names: Tel Aviv, New Delhi and Oxford.
That’s telling. Because just one year ago, as public advocate, he wrote a piece for The Huffington Post in which he claimed “London, Paris, Las Vegas, Toronto and Beijing — New York City’s chief rivals for tourism — have all banned horse-drawn carriages in recent years.”
What he wrote was false. Which explains the switcheroo.
The mayor’s shift underscores the dishonesty of the anti-horse-carriage campaign, on everything from a non-existent London ban on carriages to outrageous charges of animal cruelty against the Central Park drivers. All for a cause the public opposes by a more than two-to-one margin.
This is ideology run amok. We’re glad to see de Blasio no longer repeating the falsehoods he put his name to a year ago. But given all the half-truths and disinformation directed at these hardworking drivers, doesn’t New York’s mayor at least owe them an honest rethink before he yanks their livelihoods out from under them?