Casablanca: Stop the animal-drawn carts!

The Council of the City of Casablanca thus displays, with a little more determination, its willingness to ensure the release of the public domain in several neighborhoods through a broad campaign. Despite the grumbling of the leaders of this traffic, it should be noted that the Council remains attentive to the claims to ensure the gradual cessation, if not permanent, of animal-drawn carts that come to disrupt the public space in Casablanca, particularly in some neighborhoods and arteries.

Recently, the intervention of local authorities is increasingly noticed and allows, in particular, to make the public domain free of any hindrance and other forms of occupation that invests even the sidewalks of the largest metropolis of the Kingdom. Faced with this chaos that has lasted too long, the authorities have not gone easy. Many carts were confiscated from street vendors who monopolized the public highway in different avenues.

This action was welcomed by residents, and the mayor-president of the City Council, Nabila Rmili, announced at its recent regular meeting of the Council, she and her team would sound the death knell for this phenomenon.

This message, according to the mayor, is “in the spirit of the joint adoption of a decree prohibiting the movement of carts pulled by animals in the urban space. This should be implemented as soon as possible according to the President of the Council who said he no longer wished to see these “carts pulled by animals in circulation in Casablanca”, which undermine its vocation as a “smart city”.

Certainly, many are those who are already wondering about the societal and financial implications that this prohibition will not fail to entail on hundreds, even thousands of carters who are active in the informal and who will now be exposed to the authorities’ hunt.

For the Council, the objective of these provisions is to push these street vendors to go display their goods in markets specially designed for this purpose, where places are arranged for them, which is not the case for all.