Benjamin Kabak

The Wafels and Dinges truck, my personal favorite, parks outside of Key Food in Park Slope on Saturdays. (Photo by flickr user Adam Kuban)

I am an unabashed fan of New York’s burgeoning food truck scene. From the Wafels & Dinges stalwart to the cookies from the Treats Truck to Mexicue’s sliders and beyond, I find the food trucks to be a breath of fresh air amidst New York’s stagnant lunch scene, and I eye Los Angeles, Portland and the Bay Area enviously for their vibrant food truck and food cart offerings.

Unfortunately, though, while many New Yorkers agree with me, those with power — the restaurant and food services industry — don’t feel the same way. To them, the food trucks represent a threat. While no longer a novelty, they have remained popular by offering good, cheap food, and from Midtown to Park Slope, bricks-and-mortar stores feel threatened. They don’t want to lose their customers to better options and think that food trucks, which do pay taxes and do adhere to DOH standards, are leeching off of their businesses. Competition, of course, is good for everyone, but try telling that to someone with an insane rent on a mediocre deli on 48th Street.

To that end, restaurants and delis have often tried to get food trucks to move. They’ve complained to the cops and to City Council members; they try to get parking regulations changed or old laws enforced. It is, as The Times noted earlier this week, working:

In the last 10 days, the Treats Truck, which has sold cookies and brownies for four years during lunchtime at West 45th Street near Avenue of the Americas, has been told by police officers that it is no longer welcome there, nor at its late-afternoon 38th Street and Fifth Avenue location. The Rickshaw Dumpling truck, a presence for three years at West 45th Street near the Treats Truck, has been shooed away as well.

The police “have told us they no longer want food trucks in Midtown,” said Kim Ima, the owner of the Treats Truck, a pioneer of the city’s new-wave food-truck movement, who began cultivating customers on West 45th Street in 2007.

Also ejected from their customary Midtown locations recently were the Comme Ci, Comme Ça Truck at 38th Street and Broadway; the Desi Truck at West 50th Street between Seventh Avenue and Avenue of the Americas; the Eddie’s Pizza Truck, the Kimchi Taco Truck and the Wafels & Dinges Truck, all at West 52nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas; the Crisp on Wheels truck at West 51st Street and Seventh Avenue. Members of the ragtag fleet of generic soft ice cream trucks in the area have been cast out, too.

Few if any of these trucks have been ticketed, and few towed. Nevertheless, some vendors who tried to return have been shooed away again. Many, including the Treats Truck, consider themselves permanently displaced and are trying to find other locations. In some cases, they have been turned out of their new neighborhoods, too.

According to The Times, this drive to push food carts out of midtown stems from a recent New York State Supreme Court case that turned to an old law “believed to date from the 1950s.” The law bars any “vendor, hawker or huckster shall park a vehicle at a metered parking space” from offering “merchandise for sale from the vehicle.” In May, Judge Geoffrey Wright decided this law applied to food trucks, and cops in certain Midtown precincts where delis feel most threatened have ramped up the pressure to get food trucks to move.

Now, the problem here isn’t just one of a limited culinary palate. It’s one of street prioritization. Food trucks inherently encourage pedestrians to use the sidewalk space they have, and they turn road space otherwise taken up by either idle and empty parked cars or moving traffic into an economically beneficial activity. Food trucks should be encouraged, and laws leftover from the 1950s when no one had even heard of the Rickshaw Dumpling Truck should be discarded. Of course, that would require a City Council willing to face down the food services lobby, and that won’t happen. Somehow, food services are louder and more vocal than pedestrians.

One day, the city will better allocate street space based on use. Then, we’ll be able to enjoy our waffles, our cookies and our overpriced lobster rolls in peace. For now, the food trucks will be marginalized to neighborhoods that actually want them.

An example of NYCDOT's proposed neighborhood map. (NYC Department of Transportation)

Few New Yorkers would ever admit it, but now and then, a map comes in handy. Sure, most neighborhoods throughout large stretches of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and, of course, Manhattan are laid out on a grid, but maps can be useful. Perhaps one is bound for a new neighborhood; perhaps one doesn’t know where they are at the top of an unfamiliar subway staircase; perhaps one finds oneself in Chinatown and just can’t figure out where Pell St. is anyway.

And then of course, there are the tourists who get lost trying to figure out which way’s 8th Ave. and which way is 6th Ave. when they’re standing on 7th Ave. Forget trying to guide them through neighborhoods where the streets have no numbers. That’s hopeless.

Other cities have solved this problem through an innovation called a map. In Philadelphia, for instance, the city has taken the initiative to encourage walking by posting signs directing pedestrians to nearby attractions (PDF) while hanging up neighborhood maps that guide the way. These maps show an entire neighborhood with distance-based circles showing how far away the walker may be from his or her destination. Talk about convenience.

Now, New York wants to get in on the game. On Monday, NYC’s Department of Transportation has issued an Request for Proposals for surface-based maps. The initial contract for five years would cover four neighborhoods with an additional option on the deal for another five years and another five neighborhoods. It seems like a slow process for something that could help with city life, but that’s New York’s bureaucracy for you.

“New Yorkers seem to know it all, except how to get around town sometimes,” Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said. “We’ve got great signage for cars, but we don’t have great directional signage for pedestrians.”

For now, DOT would like to test out signs in the following neighborhoods: Long Island City, Queens; Prospect Heights/Crown Heights, Brooklyn; and Chinatown and parts of Midtown in Manhattan. The Times reports that this initiative will cost $1.5 million with federal and business dollars accounting for $1.2 million of that total. The Wall Street Journal noted that the city is willing to spend up to $9.5 million on the project.

The impetus for the project, NYC DOT says, came from a recent intercept survey conducted citywide. Five hundred pedestrians were stopped and peppered with questions, and the findings were not too comforting. Nine percent of city residents and 27 percent of visitors said they had been lost within the past seven days while 13 percent of New Yorkers were unfamiliar with the area they were in. A whopping 27 percent of visitors couldn’t even name the borough in which they were surveyed, and 33 percent of city residents couldn’t point north. It’s seemingly a wonder anyone gets around.

As The Journal noted, this effort is part of a larger initiative to better unify city neighborhoods and help New Yorkers navigate. For instance, the area between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges in Manhattan has suffered through an identity crisis. “In different spaces, according to the Department of Transportation,” The Journal said, “that space has been labeled as Chinatown, Two Bridges, Knickerbocker Village and the Seaport Historic District.” And of course, there’s Queens with its various Roads, Streets, Drives and Avenues all with the same numbers.

It might, as The Times says, be a badge of pride to know the way around, but getting lost too seems to be a hallmark of a New Yorker. Why not solve that problem too?