I just came back on Tuesday from a long business trip in Chicago. I never noticed until it was pointed out to me by a native that there are almost no food trucks in the city. That's not an accident; Chicago's draconian food-truck laws say that only trucks that don't perform cooking or preparation of any kind of their food can exist.
Fortunately, New York is more lenient...at least for now. Councilwoman Jessica Lappin wants to revoke the license of any food truck that gets three parking tickets within a year. Effectively, this would kill the food truck industry -- because it's nearly impossible for trucks to find an all-day legal spot to park, and because even police officers don't know which spots are legal and which are not. (Non-objective law, anyone?) Meanwhile, delivery companies regard parking tickets as a cost of doing business, and foreign diplomats ignore them entirely.
I will be very sad indeed if this law gets passed, putting food trucks out of business. New York's food scene is vibrant and wonderful in part because of trucks like the Cupcake Stop, Wafels and Dinges, the Bistro Truck, and many more that keep us Gothamites fed and happy at inexpensive prices.
The solution is not laws that effectively make it illegal to run a food truck in NYC. What we need is private property -- so that the owner of a street or sidewalk can decide whether his space is worth more to him as a parking spot, as a space for a food truck, or something else entirely.
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