Night fell, and the blazing lights of Prague's New Town bathed the entire district in a brightness like day.
Carriages flowed endlessly before the opera house, while the silk formalwear of society's men and women gleamed all the more brilliantly beneath the lights.
The shops lining both sides of the streets were filled with people who stayed awake through the night. Noisy new-style music, clinking glasses, and the cries and teasing laughter in German and Czech blended together—this was a true city that never slept.
The rivalry between carriage drivers and rickshaw pullers had already reached a white-hot pitch. The carriage guild had deployed every means at its disposal to fight the tide of rickshaws.
Not every city was Vienna. In some places, flexible adjustments had been made within the broad framework Franz had established.
For instance, in Bohemia at this time, carriage drivers had to pay double taxes and even road maintenance fees.
Meanwhile, rickshaw pullers were strictly limited to working no more than eight hours, had to yield to carriages, and were further bound by road bans.
Yet these laws were not meant to protect the rights of rickshaw pullers, but to curb their competitiveness.
Even so, the cost advantage of human-powered tricycles left the entire carriage industry struggling for breath. But the carriage economy was not merely about the drivers themselves.
It also included the industries that built carriages, bred horses, and provided related services. None of these people wanted human-powered tricycles to replace carriages. Their livelihoods were at stake, so naturally they had to fight with everything they had.
In Vienna, Franz was there to hold the line, and his forceful implementation could resolve many problems.
But Prague was precisely the opposite. These people did not want to surrender their ecological niche, nor did they want