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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]


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  1. “Plus, restaurants contribute more money to political campaigns and they view the food trucks as unfair competition. This is pay back to campaign contributors to keep out competition.”

    exactly. This goes on all the time. Shows you who is for sale on the city council, I suppose….

  2. yeah, this doesnt sound like not a revenue impact to city – especially if they transfer these seized biz licenses to folks on their waiting list. City could pick on other pressing matters but this one is a legit one (albeit small). In other cities, these trucks are roaming (vs parked at a spot 4ever).

    as a customer, would like the city to not pick on them but I can’t say it’s wrong for the city to pick on them

  3. tyburg – yes, some are. If it’s too much of a hassle to park on Bedford Avenue (for example), then maybe I’ll just drive to Target or some other shopping center with a parking lot. Yes, a lot (probably most) of business is walk-ins, but look at the turnover of cars on Bedford, Manhattan, Court, etc.

    Boerumresident – kind of my question, too. What is unclear to me is whether the food trucks are competing fairly with brick-and-mortar restaurants AND with sidewalk vendors. The latter two pay rent or franchise fees to the city for the right to sell on sidewalks. Do food trucks? Or are they assumed to be mobile, and therefore pay lower fees? I have no idea.

  4. And to clarify with an example… let’s say a food truck takes up a parking spot for the whole day. They are preventing, what, maybe NINE or TEN cars from parking for an hour… if it’s 2-hour parking, maybe 4 or 5 cars. How many of those cars are shopping (a) at *any* shop, (b) at a shop anywhere near their parking spot, and (c) have decided to shop elsewhere because of this…

    With regard to (c) — that decision was probably made in 1963.

    If you’re in Manhattan or the dense parts of Brooklyn and Queens and your business depends on your customers parking out front…. well, you should have rethought your business model about 50 years ago.

  5. Are businesses *really* dependent on customers with cars?

    (Keep in mind we’re not talking about Bensonhoist or somewhere in Queens…. this is in the parts of the city where the ratio of cars to people is ridiculously small.)

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