Less than 24 hours after City Council Members Jessica Lappin and Karen Koslowitz introduced a new bill designed to crack down on food trucks in New York City, we spotted this cop writing up a ticket for the falafel truck that started camping out on the corner of Front and Main Streets in Dumbo a few weeks ago. Under the new bill, the DOH can revoke the vending permit of any truck that gets three parking tickets within a 12-month period. Lappin told the blog Midtown Lunch: “The piece of it that gets under my skin is the feeding of the meter. These are public streets and nobody has the right to use them exclusively. People were willing to look the other way, until it was being abused. It’s against the law but clearly the penalty [parking tickets] is not severe enough to make people obey the law.” Not surprisingly, food truck vendors are up in arms. “Revoking [a permit] at 3 per year sounds like a Stalinist sabotage of the industry,” said the man behind the popular Wafels & Dinges truck; he says he gets an average of three per month.
Food Trucks Could Face Ban for Too Many Parking Tickets [WSJ]
NYC Council to Introduce First Anti-Food Truck Law [Midtown Lunch]
New Bill Could Be Big Trouble for Food Trucks [Gothamist]