17/12/2020
It seems a wrong title, but unfortunately it is not: our Highway Code still allows the circulation of animal-powered vehicles on urban and extra-urban roads.
What happened yesterday between the provinces of Naples and Caserta is a direct consequence of the current Code, a car collided with a gig that detached itself from the horse. The latter, frightened, began to run madly, bumping into other vehicles and then crashed into a car coming from the opposite direction. The horse died shortly afterwards, whilst the person driving the car miraculously escaped unharmed. The boy who was driving the horse is hospitalized.
From the local news it is clear that the accident occurred on a provincial road, which happened in the late afternoon (and therefore already in the dark) and that it was not a gig but a sulky, or the two-wheeled cart used in trotting competitions in the hippodrome.
Here is the aberration of the current Highway code, allowing not only the circulation of carriages on urban roads, a phenomenon as anachronistic as it is dangerous, but also the circulation of the sulky.
Usually, the use of a sulky follows real training of horses intended for racecourses or clandestine racing. Everyone knows this but cannot intervene. The circulation of the sulky on the roads is allowed, as mentioned above, as long as it is not a competition between two or more horses and is one of the many rules that needs to be changed in our legal system.
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