Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington: like New York, America's other big cities, and many smaller cities, have seen the proliferation of mobile food vendors in the past decade. This growth has meant better lunch options for downtown workers and tourists. But it's also presented officials in various cities with problems, from health-code violations to pollution.
“New York, and other cities, need to better enforce pollution rules and allocate street and sidewalk space more efficiently.”
New York, though, is still the nation's food-truck and food-cart capital, with 3,100 legally licensed vendors selling everything from classic hot dogs to small-batch popcorn on almost every corner of the city's densest areas. (Many more vendors operate illegally.)
And while many cities confine their food trucks and carts to certain main thoroughfares and parks at certain times, New York, with a few exceptions, lets them operate wherever their proprietors like.
Now, New York City Council wants to double the number of food-truck and -cart permits it awards. The permits are good for both carts, which operate on sidewalks and trucks, which operate on streets, whichever the vendor prefers.
New York, though, should do this only in tandem with much better rules and enforcement of these rules – with the public seeing the better enforcement before the city gives out more permits.
One critical rule would govern pollution. At a City Council hearing last week, an official from Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said that “one additional vendor grilling meat emits an amount of particle pollution in one day to what a diesel truck emits driving 3,500 miles.”
In addition to grilling, vendors rely on portable generators that are so environmentally inefficient that they should only be used in emergencies, not on an everyday basis. Portable generators whirring on every corner are hardly the mark of a global city trying to keep emissions down.
The mayor should sign off on the legislation only if new carts and trucks are powered by some combination of solar, cleaner-burning natural gas and battery storage. Longer term, the city should create underground electrical hookups for vendors.
Increasing the number of mobile-vendor permits in a dense city is also yet another opportunity for planners to rethink how cities use their dense streets. Vendors naturally want to sell where the buyers are – just as taxi and other for-hire drivers want to idle where potential fares are. That, of course, is in the busiest parts of the city, already too congested.
More space for vendors on sidewalks and streets means less space for everybody else. So the city must continue to favor people on foot, on bicycles and in buses, not in inefficient private or for-hire cars.
In enforcing better pollution rules and allocating its street and sidewalk space more efficiently, New York could be a model for the nation.
This piece originally appeared at The New York Times' Room for Debate
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The New York Times