Not sure where you are but here in the UK it's quite legal to ride a horse or drive a horse with a carriage of some kind on the road. The carriage needs to be "road worthy" but aside from that you don't even need a license of any kind unless you're transporting passengers.

It's just not very fast compared to modern cars and quite expensive so not as many people do it.

Edit: Oh one minor mostly common sense note -

You can't ride/drive horses on the motorway and probably shouldn't on faster roads or dual carriageways due to the rest of the traffic going far faster than you.

In fact, in Australia, if you ride your horse up to a pub/bar, they're technically legally required to give water and feed for the horses.

That's awesome! Is it legal to ride your horse while inebriated?

No, so put some oats in his feedbag and let him sleep it off.

Oh, you meant the rider. Yeah, that's fine.

> Is it legal to ride your horse while inebriated?

there was a fellow arrested in colorado a few years back for that:

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_24052312/cu-bould...

probably safer than walking.

Only if the horse is sober.

In my country they are banned on highways, national roads, cities. I was referring to that.

I think banning them on congested roads will increase the demand for public transport which is what we should have on those road anyway.

You want to ban cars on congested roads? Isn't that a paradox? If cars are banned on a road then it won't be congested anymore, so cars will be allowed on it, then it will get congested so cars get banned ... in the end I think what you're suggesting is running around giving tickets to people in traffic jams.

Also, in what country did they ban horses?

That's taking the idea to absurd extreme. You don't flip-flop the law every day. London for example has a congestion zone around the main city, which involves multiple limits and in many places removed congestion. This doesn't mean those areas are free for all again - the zone remains to keep out / reduce the congestion which would otherwise come back.

In my defense, the OP said "banning cars." In London to deal with congestion they basically just turn large sections of the city into a toll road. That's pretty different than "banning cars"

That's true, but whether banning cars or making it less attractive to cars (e.g. with London's congestion charge), the point is that places already have people working on road planning/etc., it can be done with humans making decisions, not a piece of code going "if (congested) {ban cars} else {allow cars}".

To use Oxford as a small example of more than a toll, there's a few roads in the city centre that only buses/taxis are allowed to use, and a few roads that only pedestrians can use (with some time-specific exceptions for loading/unloading/etc.). Nobody looks at it and thinks "well now it's not congested we should allow cars again".

> If cars are banned on a road then it won't be congested anymore, so cars will be allowed on it, then it will get congested so cars get banned

Some roads are congested even with private cars banned (e.g. Oxford Street).

> in the end I think what you're suggesting is running around giving tickets to people in traffic jams.

Would that be such a bad thing? Obv. it would need to be a little more formalized than that.

You don't work in a city with shitty traffic and public transport systems, then. I live in D.C.

If I were to take public transportation to my job it would take about twice as long and involve me walking 5 miles both ways. And I get in traffic jams daily.

So yeah, if you went around penalizing people for something largely outside their ability to control, there would be riots in the streets.

You put public transport instead. At least on some city centers this is already happening.

Ah I see yes they are banned in the EU on highways - I'm guessing you're referring to Romania going by the site in your profile -

I'll concede that yeah in that situation (the ban resulting in going from business horses to no horses) was essentially banning them. They're not technically banned as such, but the rules they're under changed too much for them to be viable.

Also they should not use cycle lanes unless local signs explicitly state otherwise.

I didn't know that specific rule but I think I would have assumed it were I riding a horse.

In regard to road rules I'd see a horse as more a downgraded car than an upgraded bike, sorta like a motorbike but slower.

It's not a rule, it's a "should not", not a "must not".

Rule 54: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-about-ani...

> You MUST NOT take a horse onto a footpath or pavement, and you should not take a horse onto a cycle track. Use a bridleway where possible. Equestrian crossings may be provided for horse riders to cross the road and you should use these where available (see Rule 27). You should dismount at level crossings where a ‘horse rider dismount’ sign is displayed.

Horses aren't banned. If you spend some time in a big city, they're everywhere. Police ride them, people ride them, people use them to pull carts and pull other people. The horses are always less useful than machines, but they exist.

China doing a massive ban-change to vehicles wouldn't be a first. Friedman wrote about their policy shifts in Hot, Flat, and Crowded. China has implemented changes to vehicle emissions in just a few years that took the US decades (e.g. unleaded gas). So, okay, they won't ban cars outright, but it isn't impossible to imagine other scenarios that would be impossible to imagine the US doing in the same time period.

Horses declined after a better option - cars - were widely available and accepted. I'm all for coming up with a better solution, but if you ban cars before we have that solution you'll effectively shut down civilization in much of the developed world.

"We" did? Who is "we"?

>"Every person having control or charge of a vehicle shall, whenever upon any way and approaching any horse, drive, manage, and control such vehicle in such a manner as to exercise every reasonable precaution to prevent the frightening of such horse, and to insure the safety and protection of any person riding or driving the same."

That's the law (for instance) in New Hampshire. The same article (the very first link when I search for "horse street legal united states") http://cs.thehorse.com/blogs/horses-and-the-law/archive/2012... further states

>Traffic laws in a few states, including Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico, specifically state that horses have all the rights and obligations of other vehicles when they are being ridden or driven on a public highway. Everywhere else, except in states like Louisiana where it appears to be illegal to ride a horse on a paved road, riders and drivers probably enjoy similar rights and obligations by implication.

>Some states prohibit specific conduct when riding on a highway: It is illegal to ride a horse at night in New Mexico; to cross bridges at a gait faster than a walk in Idaho, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania; to ride or drive a horse "recklessly" in Nevada; to race or run horses on a highway in Kentucky, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, or New Jersey; to ride on a levee in Kentucky; and to ride on interstate highways in several states. Horses should be ridden on the right-hand side of the road, going with the flow of traffic, almost everywhere except Colorado, where riders must ride on the left.

Sorry but I don't think you know what you're talking about, you're not in the United States, or you failed to specify enough context so that in that limited situation your statement is true. At the very least you failed to make a simple Google search for a sweeping generalization that is demonstrably not true.

Hold your horses! It's just a comment on internet and I didn't think I had to treat all edge cases :)) Also, if you don't have enough context for something it doesn't mean you should pick any random context...

I'm sorry, but you were assuming a non-obvious context here, as you can see from the many responses.

Without any context the entire world is your edge case, mate. Sorry if I'm being a bit pedantic but HN is not Reddit.

when did horses get banned?

2007, in Romania [1][2]. More specifically, horse-drawn carts were banned. From what I can see, the movement to ban them stems from an argument that horse-drawn carts/carriages are a form of animal cruelty [3]. I haven't seen anything that singles out/bans horses (with riders, rather than carriages) though.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2013/02/14/the-ro...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578965/Horses-lef...

[3] https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-in-entertainment/horse-d...

Depends on your location. In my country they are banned on highways, national roads and cities or in other words in all those places in which cars rule.

Well, in the Netherlands and I think most other European countries, they are banned on car-only roads (i.e., motorways and expressways; autosnelweg and autoweg in Dutch). Elsewhere, including cities, they are allowed.

I thought horses was banned because they ... produce some unwanted mass on the road which hard to clean?

Cars on the other hand, don't do that at all.

Maybe that's the reason why cars are not banned.

>I thought horses was banned because they ... produce some unwanted mass on the road which hard to clean? > >Cars on the other hand, don't do that at all.

Cars do it, but instead of it being a hard to clean mass, it's a nearly-impossible-to-clean toxic gas that kills thousands of people every year.

I actually agree with what you said.

What I mean is that the "nearly-impossible-to-clean toxic gas" is also "nearly-impossible-to-see" when in the air.

See, that's why they're not banned, because people "Don't see" the problem.

If cars needs to take a sold mass smelly hot dump every few miles too, they were long banned.

Non-electric cars will be banned in most inner cities probably within the decade because of their pollution, sort of a parallel with how horses were banned earlier.

Horses were banned? Here you just need a horse-drawn carriage license, but good luck getting one.

It was already addressed in other content that they're not banned everywhere, but additionally, the poop you mention is not a big problem. In many places horses in the cities are forced to wear horse-size napies which catch the poop.

Yes. But cars produce unwanted mess in atmosphere that in almost impossible to clean..

Horses were never banned (except maybe locally), they're just far more expensive and difficult to run than cars.

Depending on local regulations, you may of course be fined if you don't clean up your horse's mess.

Horse poop degrades fairly rapidly (relative to omnivore and carnivore excrement). Doesn't smell as bad either.

Cars produce all sorts of chemical compounds that ruin the air we breath.

No. It doesn't degrade rapidly. It stays there for weeks unless there's rain. It does smell bad. Hitting a fresh one is a cyclists worst nightmare.

I'm not saying cars are innocent here, but at least they don't poop.