Do Food Trucks and Pedestrians Conflict on Urban Streets?

Journal of Urban Design ISSN: 1357-4809 (Print) 1469-9664 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjud20 Do food trucks and pedestrians conflict on urban streets? Renia Ehrenfeucht To cite this article: Renia Ehrenfeucht (2017) Do food trucks and pedestrians conflict on urban streets?, Journal of Urban Design, 22:2, 273-290, DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2017.1281731 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2017.1281731 Published online: 06 Feb 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 200 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjud20 Download by: [Tarbiat Modares University] Date: 05 November 2017, At: 21:39 JOURNAL OF URBAN DESIGN, 2017 VOL. 22, NO. 2, 273–290 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2017.1281731 Do food trucks and pedestrians conflict on urban streets? Renia Ehrenfeucht Community and Regional Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA ABSTRACT In the late 2000s, food trucks became common in US cities and municipalities debated controversial food truck regulations. When they justify the regulations, municipalities raise safety, health and general welfare concerns, including potential pedestrian congestion. This paper uses the insights from pedestrian behaviour research to determine whether food trucks interfered with pedestrian flow. Based on direct observation of food truck customers and customer- pedestrian interactions in and near the Chicago Loop, the findings show that food trucks served customers most often without interrupting pedestrian flow. In part, this was due to the street furniture zone, including trash cans, bike racks and utility poles that created waiting space along the kerb. During periods of crowding, pedestrians adeptly manoeuvred through lines of food trucks. Food truck customers were also responsive to pedestrian flow and the lines moved in ways that reduced impact. Introduction In 2008, Roy Choi’s fusion taco truck Kogi became a Los Angeles sensation (Shouse 2011). People travelled long distances around Los Angeles to wait in 45-minute lines for his Korean tacos. Since then, food trucks have appeared in US cities from Seattle to Savannah and Chicago to New Orleans. This has led to conflicting pressures to both enable and restrict food trucks, and municipalities across the US have debated food truck ordinances. In 2010, Chicago chefs Matt Maroni and Philip Foss approached their aldermen about revising Chicago’s mobile food vending ordinance to allow cooking on food trucks. When Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack introduced a revised ordinance, he met with resistance Downloaded by [Tarbiat Modares University] at 21:39 05 November 2017 from another alderman, a member of the Illinois Restaurant Association whose opposition was based on competition with brick-and-mortar restaurants (Esparza, Walker, and Rossman 2014). In 2012, the City passed an ordinance that allowed vendors to cook on food trucks. The City’s press release celebrated the change because food trucks created jobs and enhanced its vibrant food culture. Nevertheless, food trucks were prohibited within 200 feet of restaurants except at designated food truck stands and they had to move every two hours. The City announced the ordinance as ‘a collaboration between the mobile food operators and the restaurant industry’ (City of Chicago Press release, 10 August 2012), but two food CONTACT Renia Ehrenfeucht [email protected] © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group R. EHRENFEUCHT 274 truck operators subsequently legally challenged the 200-foot limit and an additional require- ment that trucks install GPS tracking devices. Once the new regulations were challenged, a second discussion took shape. Because local governments in the US cannot explicitly limit competition, they justify the ordinances on grounds that align with their police power to protect health, welfare and safety. The City of Chicago defended the ordinance based on the potential the food trucks had to create trash and pedestrian congestion. This research uses a public space approach to evaluate whether potential food trucks create the street level pedestrian congestion or trash impacts. The research addressed three questions: in what ways do food truck customers impact pedestrians on city sidewalks? Do food truck customers generate observable trash on city sidewalks? Were there observable differences when food trucks operated within 200 feet of restaurants? Using direct observation of the food trucks operating along urban sidewalks, this analysis found pedestrians adeptly manoeuvred through crowding and both food truck customers and pedestrians self-organized to facilitate pedestrian flow. No trash impacts or differences within 200 feet of restaurants were observed. The new attention to street food vending ordinances offers an opportunity to bring insight about the use of public space and public behaviour to the political regulatory process. This can help shape equitable street vending policies that facilitate compatibility among public space uses. The regulation of street food vending Food trucks and street food in the US Choi has been credited with sparking a new food truck craze (Shouse 2011), but the trend can be attributed to a confluence of factors. Choi built on Los Angeles’s longstanding tradi- tion of catering trucks (colloquially known as taco trucks) that served work sites, institutions, festivals and events, and others were experimenting with street food during that period (Myint and Leibowitz 2011). These new food truck operators offer fresh, novel food that appeals to urban residents (Intuit 2012) who also value variety, including pop-up bars and restaurants and street vending (Zukin 2010; Myint and Leibowitz 2011; Shouse 2011; Bishop and Williams 2012). During the recession in the late 2000s, as restaurants struggled, food trucks became an opportunity for restaurateurs (Newman and Burnett 2013; Esparza, Walker, and Rossman 2014; Martin 2014) because the $20,000 to $50,000 required to start a food truck is much less than a restaurant at $400,000 (Shouse 2011). Downloaded by [Tarbiat Modares University] at 21:39 05 November 2017 The National Restaurant Association estimated that 2012 mobile food industry sales were $650 million, or approximately 1% of restaurant revenues. Emergent Research and Intuit have projected that number will grow to $2.7 billion by 2017 (Intuit 2012). In 2012, the industry market research firm IBISWorld named street vending one of 11 hot start-up indus- tries based on both increasing numbers and low start-up costs (Forbes 2012). Although few ‘gourmet’ food trucks operated before 2008, by 2012 there were over 1400 in US cities (Esparza, Walker, and Rossman 2014). Food trucks are one of many types of street commerce. People begin street vending because the barriers to entry are low. In the US, street vendors often worked in immigrant neighbourhoods where such enterprises were familiar and newcomers needed to make a living (Bromley 2000; Raijman 2001; Stoller 2002; Cross and Morales 2007; Kettles 2007; JOURNAL OF URBAN DESIGN 275 Martin 2014). In some cities, including Los Angeles and New York, street vending notably increased with more immigration in the 1980s (Stoller 1996; Kettles 2007). Consumers patronize street vendors because they are inexpensive and convenient (Bromley 2000; Donovan 2008; Urban Vitality Group 2008). In an online survey, Portland food cart customers prioritized the food’s low cost. Fewer than 20% of respondents anticipated frequenting vendors who moved to brick-and-mortar establishments with higher prices (Urban Vitality 2008). In San Francisco, however, food truck customers prioritized food quality and convenience (Wessel 2012), which speaks to changing perceptions about food trucks. Popular media distinguishes ‘gourmet’ food trucks from ‘roach coaches’ and researchers have turned attention to new food trucks (Wessel 2012; Esparza, Walker, and Rossman 2014). Previous efforts to decriminalize sidewalk vending have had limited success (Kettles 2007; Martin 2014), but new food trucks have received public support. Martin (2014) has argued that public officials embraced the new food trucks because their customers and proprietors are middle-income residents associated with gentrification and the creative class (see also, Newman and Burnett 2013; Esparza, Walker, and Rossman 2014). Street food vending regulation The US has never affirmatively granted rights to people to work in the street, unlike Mexico, Colombia and India, where constitutional courts granted some rights (Meneses-Reyes and Caballero-Juarez 2014). Because complex and restrictive regulations make it difficult to vend without violating the law, most street commerce is informal. In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of New York’s street vendors worked informally (Stoller 1996), the same as many of the estimated 20,000 vendors in 2015 (The Street Vendor Project n.d.). In Los Angeles, street vendor estimates range from 10,000 to 50,000 who generate approximately $504 million annually in sales (Hsu 2014; The Economic Roundtable n.d). In 2010, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health licensed 3820 food trucks, only about half of those operating (Shouse 2011). Street vending prohibitions have nineteenth-century roots, a time when thousands of mobile food vendors sold a variety of fresh and prepared foods by foot, cart and wagon (Bluestone 1991; Morales

Load more