In the span of one week, New York City lost a horse and a teenager to the same broken industry. Deniz, a 16-year-old carriage horse, collapsed and died in Central Park. Days later, 18-year-old Romanch Mahajan died after jumping from a runaway horse-drawn carriage while trying to save his mother, who had fallen onto the roadway. Tragically, he didn't survive his injuries. This isn't bad luck. It's a pattern the City Council has tolerated for years.
Sign the petition to demand the New York City Council pass Romanch's Law immediately and end horse-drawn carriage rides in the city for good.
This industry has had every chance to prove it's safe, and it keeps failing. In 2022, a carriage horse named Ryder collapsed while pulling tourists through Manhattan, and the legislation now known as Romanch's Law first bore his name. It has since been renamed in honor of Romanch, whose own family refuses to let his death be ignored and is now fighting to see this law pass so no other family is torn apart the same way.
Horses keep collapsing in the middle of city streets. A teenager is dead because he tried to save his mother from a carriage that never should have been running through Central Park in the first place.
Romanch's Law ends the excuses. It phases out horse-drawn carriages, retires the city's remaining horses so they never pull another carriage through traffic again, and puts real job training and transition support behind the drivers who currently rely on this work. There is no version of this where waiting longer makes sense. The horses aren't safe. The streets aren't safe. And people are dying.
Sign the petition now and demand the New York City Council pass Romanch's Law without delay, so Ryder, Deniz, and Romanch are the last names this city adds to a list that should have never existed.
