Sometimes I think I should give up writing about the New York Carriage Horses and turn it over to the White Rabbit From Alice In Wonderland. Perhaps he could make sense out of it: “Is it yellow? Is it blue. Is it really something true?”

The carriage horse controversy is filled with moral inversions, double-standards, fantasies, selective morality and illusion. Perhaps that is what makes it so fascinating and wrenching at the same time. It is a mad thing, to make sense out of it, you have to understand that it makes no sense at all.

Nothing illustrates this more than the parable of the carriage horses and the pedicabs, both of whom compete for beautiful and precious space in Central Park and for the flowing dollars of tourists, carriage horse lovers and romantics.

The pedicab business began in New York in the 80’s and 90’s when creative but starving actors and artists put carts on their bikes to deliver things and offer rides to people on crowded Manhattan streets under-served by taxis. There were a handful of them, they charged little. They were an inexpensive,  novel alternative to the yellow cabs, a quiet way to get through clogged streets. I remember my first pedicab ride, it was in the rain, the driver was funny and appealing, he charged me $5 dollars to get through jammed up streets for a lunch meeting.

A great way, I thought, to get around.

Today, the artists and actors are gone,  replaced mostly by poor immigrant teenagers and their aggressive intrapaneur owners, and the pedicab business has become a profitable industry. It is no longer a great way to get around.

There are more than 800 pedicab licenses and 1,000 drivers. Pedicabs have become a widely acknowledged nightmare in and around Central Park. They crowd paths and sidewalks, harass pedestrians and visitors, and the city has been flooded with complaints by tourists and visitors who have been charged hundreds of dollars for 10-minute rides in the park.

The cabs are ugly, they are often filthy – I checked out a half-dozen recently –  and anyone who comes within two blocks of the park is beset by aggressive hawkers and pamphleteers who follow tourists, interrupt conversations.

When the actors were pedaling around mid-town, it seemed a charming and eco-friendly way to get around. There were no complaints of scams and over-charging.

Although the city is struggling to regulate their fees, so far they have failed – one Japanese family recently returned to Tokyo to find $400 charged to their credit card for a 10-minute pedicab ride. A family from Kansas was charge $160, for a four-minute ride through the park (that would cost $50 on a horse carriage and last three times as long.)

The rates are confusing, often a scam. I saw five different prices on five different pedicabs, the most common being $3 a minute.  Many of the drivers “add on” a fee for person at the end of the ride, for one Texas family the “add-on” fee was $400.

The pedicab rides are much more expensive than a horse carriage ride. I took a short ride on my last trip to New York, and the best word I can use to describe it unpleasant. The ride is jarring and bumpy, the pedicab feels every crack in the road, just like a bicycle, which it is. It is low to the ground, about level with taxi and car fumes and sounds. The drivers seem to know nothing about the park, if they speak English at all. It is not clear how much the ride costs or where the pedicab is going. The pedicab lurches back and forth as the driver pedals and because it is so low to the ground, there is little real perspective on the beautiful vistas and landscaping of the park.

Mostly, you get a view of the sides of cabs and cars.

It is difficult to imagine why the city would permit these cabs to flood the entrances to the park and the roadways inside of it. I don’t think these would pass muster in Shanghai, where they are common. Or why anyone might prefer them to a ride in a horse-drawn carriage.  On my last trip, three pedicab hawkers came up to me and showed me a pamphlet that suggested they were offering carriage horse rides, there were photos of horses on the pamphlets.  “Why are you showing a photo of a horse?,” I asked. “This isn’t a carriage ride.”

“Oh,” said the driver, a young man with a Caribbean accent, “we drive right by the horses all the time. You can see them.”

One hawker followed Maria and I for a block-and-a-half and wouldn’t stop until I stopped and told him he needed to back off or we would seek help. Consumer advocates recommend that visitors avoid pedicabs altogether, there are just too many scams, they are too difficult to regulate and the city doesn’t spent too much time trying. Perhaps they are too busy making sure the carriage horses get their five weeks of vacation.

The carriage drivers believes the pedicabs are another front opened up to take business away from them and drive them out of the park. One carriage trade official said the pedicabs siphon as much as $2 million away from the carriage trade each year. The pedicab/horse carriage juxtaposition would make a wonderful study for urban planners in how to break something that isn’t broken, and undercut something that doesn’t need fixing.

Frederick Law Olmstead would bust a blood vessel if he could see what they have done to his park. You can argue about the carriage horses all you want, but does anybody really need a bicycle ride through the park for $3 a minute? Will any kid remember it, or any couple want a ride after getting married?

The city has, in a great measure despoiled the park in much the same way the carriage horses enhance it and fit into it so gracefully. The pedicabs crowd the roads and the walkways and make the entrances to the park an obstacle course, forcing people to dodge shouting hawkers, aggressive drivers and the scores of cabs themselves.

For me, this is yet another example of what I call “moral inversion.”

All this focus on the horses, does anyone notice what is happening to the people?

Why, I wonder, is it okay for young men, mostly from other countries, to haul several hundred pounds of human beings on bicycles in extreme weather – hot and cold, but not okay for huge draft horses bred for centuries to pull proportionately much lighter loads?

It is much easier for a nearly 2,000 pound draft horse to pull a carriage with rubber wheels on flat ground than for a human being – often visibly sweating and straining – to pull a couple of people through Central Park. I talked to several of these young men in the park, and I was not as surprised as I ought to have been to learn that the horses are treated much better than they are. One of the drivers told me – I paid him and his buddies for their time to talk to me – that his brother threw out his back driving a pedicab, and was let go. He had no insurance to help with his medical bills and is unable to find another job. It is quite common, said the young men, for some of them to pass out in the heat.

“They scream at us all the time to make money, make money, or we get fired,” said Christophe. “We don’t get no breaks.”

If carriage horses were treated in this way, the city would be in an uproar, and properly so, but I do not know of any instance in memory when a carriage horse collapsed due to heat while working in New York City.

The pedicab drivers do not get five weeks of vacation, mandated health care, breaks every two hours, places to rest and be fed and sheltered. They do not get to retire on a farm when they are older, they are not fed snacks all day and led to water fountains. They pedicab drivers make no benefits at all, most of them live in poverty,  and it is not surprising to me some resort to scamming to earn a living. The pedicab drivers work brutal hours and are pressured into the kind of aggressive peddling that the carriage drivers do not do, and do not need to do.

I remember a column I wrote some months ago, in which the horses led a protest march on an Amazon Warehouse in New Jersey to protest the working conditions of people there. Maybe they should begin the march with the pedicab drivers.

The pedicabs are as unnatural to Central Park as the horses are natural – in great measure, the park was designed for horse carriages. I wonder that all of the demonstrators in New York who worry so much about the welfare of the horses don’t seem to notice the exploitation of these young men or their working conditions – they really do seem to be abused –  and the abuse the system inflicts on the park and on the tourists and visitors who use it. These working conditions do not yet seem to have caught the eye of the city’s assertively progressive mayor, who believes it is not “humane” for horses to even be in New York City, let alone work there.

When I think of the pedicab drivers hustling tourists, puffing their way through the crowded and overwhelmed park, of the dirty cabs and confusing rates, and then I think of the carriage horse controversy, my head sometimes spins. The poor people in the carriage trade, swept up in such a mad whirlwind.

How can one assert so much concern for animals while not even seeing the suffering of human beings or notice how well treated the horses are in comparison?  I do think of Alice following the White Rabbit down the hole in Wonderland.

“Your Majesty, members of the jury, loyal subjects,” he says, “the prisoner at the bar stands accused of enticing Her Majesty, the Queen Of Hearts, into a game of croquet, thereby and with malice of forethought, molesting, tormenting, and otherwise annoying our beloved…thereby causing the Queen to lose her temper…”