Will Bill de Blasio Actually Ban New York's Famous Carriage Horses?

During last year's New York mayoral campaign, Bill de Blasio was very clear about his position on carriage horses in Central Park: He thought the animals were working under unhealthy conditions and he wanted them sent out to pasture. “We're going to quickly and aggressively move to make horse carriages no longer a part of the landscape in New York City," de Blasio said shortly before his January 1 inauguration. "They're not humane, they're not appropriate to the year 2014. It's over."

Now that he’s in office, de Blasio has been moving ahead with plans to remove the 150-year-old attraction from the park. But it looks like the path to ban the carriages, long a tourist favorite and a visual cliché factory, is not necessarily going to be a smooth one.

This week, New Yorkers got a first look at one proposed alternative: an old-timey automobile powered by an electric motor. The $450,000 prototype electric buggy was unveiled at the New York Auto Show by New Yorkers for Clean, Livable, and Safe Streets, known as NYCLASS, one of the major forces working toward the elimination of carriage horses in the park. Modeled on old Rolls-Royces, production models would cost between $150,000 and $175,000.