Posts about Food Trucks

Right now, Ellsworth Drive between Fenton and Georgia is the only block in Silver Spring that has shops and restaurants lining it uninterrupted from end to end and on both sides. If I'm an office worker looking for a place to eat lunch, where will I go first? Probably the block where I have as many choices as possible.

I might go to Potbelly today, but tomorrow I'll want to try something new an d go to Chick-Fil-A, and so on. As a result, all of the restaurants benefit from the presence of other restaurants.

Many downtown blocks, however, have only a handful of shops or none at all. Discovery Communications didn't include a cafeteria in their headquarters on Georgia Avenue so workers would support local restaurants, but their building doesn't have any retail on the ground floor, making the sidewalks dead.

Meanwhile, popular restaurants like Jackie's have trouble drawing customers because they're too far away from other stores or restaurants for people to drop by on a whim.

Sligo worries that Skew Works, the new restaurant on Wayne Avenue, could lose business to a food truck that's started parking outside. But there's only one other restaurant on that entire block! Skew Works isn't losing customers to the food truck. They're losing customers to streets with more dining choices.

Restaurants want to draw more customers. We want to create more street activity in downtown Silver Spring. Food trucks seem like a way to kill two birds with one stone.

They're a relatively new addition to Silver Spring, and it's likely that they'll move around until finding locations that work well for them and for customers. But I don't think they'll hurt existing businesses.

With thousands of people living, working and passing through the area each day, there's no shortage of hungry people looking for places to eat. They just need to know where to find them.

We saw Mayor Fenty essentially stop making significant decisions once he lost the primary, but Gray was not yet mayor to start making any decisions, and so little happened in the government in the interim. Having this last for almost a year is dangerous. Councilmembers Phil Mendelson (at-large) and Tommy Wells (ward 6) raised this same objection in the session, but won over no colleagues.

Also during the legislative session, the Council gave those solar rebates to people who had qualified but suddenly found there was no money; unfortunately, this comes out of other sustainable energy funding.

They also delayed a vote on a nominee to the Board of Zoning Adjustment, Gray campaign attorney 1998-2000 DCRA head Lloyd Jordan, in part because of opposition letters from some neighborhood groups.

Sekou Biddle (interim at-large) introduced a bill to make transit free for children traveling to and from school. He argued that this will reduce truancy. It might, but it would also cost money which DC doesn't have, and there was no indication where the money might come from to pay for this.

Harry Thomas, Jr. (ward 5) introduced three car-related bills. A pair of bills asks for regulations to allow diagonal parking in business corridors, when 60% of businesses in an area ask for it, and religious institutions on Sundays, with the approval of the area ANC.

Diagonal parking can be a fine way to fit more parking into an area when there is room on the street that's not already being used. DDOT is proposing this between Tenleytown's Whole Foods and Wilson High, for instance. But in most places in DC where church parking is scarce, there isn't room on the street to add diagonal parking.

Area business corridors, ANCs, and churches should be able to petition DDOT now to consider diagonal parking if they want to. They should also be able to ask DDOT to consider removing parking, or changing a street from one-way to two-way or vice versa, or adding a bike lane.

So yes, diagonal parking should be a part of the overall toolbox, and if DDOT lacks the authority to implement it now, they should get that authority. But diagonal parking will only make sense in a very small number of cases. Thomas talked about holding town halls around his ward, and it's hard not to wonder if he's just introducing this to be able to say he's doing something at those town halls, even if that something is almost always impractical for the specific situation.

On a side note, Thomas seems to be trying to keep the bill from singling out one faith by referring to "religious institutions," but by limiting the rule to Sundays, it does exclude religious institutions which celebrate on Saturdays, for instance.

Another bill that's likely to generate more serious debate is a measure from Thomas, Michael Brown (at-large) and Marion Barry (ward 8) to establish a system of taxicab medallions, with separate categories for DC resident drivers and non-resident drivers, as well as special categories for taxis operating in underserved areas and low-emission (hybrid) taxis. This topic is worth its own, separate post.

Phil Mendelson introduced a pair of bills largely targeted at Wal-Mart. Both apply only to retailers of at least 75,000 square feet, requiring them to negotiate Community Benefits Agreements with their neighborhoods and pay living wages and benefits.

Observers think these have little chance of passing. The bills will go to committees chaired by Thomas and Michael Brown, who both court the union vote but also who have shown little interest in interfering with Walmart's expansion into DC.

Other bills included ones to require food trucks to pay sales tax, as we discussed yesterday, and expand low-income property tax relief, from Jack Evans (ward 2); to publish Council procurement information online, from Chairman Kwame Brown and Mary Cheh (ward 3); to allow L3Cs, a type of hybrid nonprofit/for-profit business entity; and a number of measures from Cheh to improve transparency.

My first encounter with a food truck court was at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey following an a cappella competition last spring. Amidst the bars and frat houses of Rutgers' student ghetto was a faculty parking lot given over to the Grease Trucks, a cluster of food carts that's become a school institution.

Here's what I wrote about them in the Diamondback:

The place was mobbed by students at 1 am, drunk and hungry for sandwiches with names such as "Fat Bitch." Picnic tables were set up for eating, and an adjacent bus stop brought in a constant stream of kids going to and from the fraternity parties a block away ...

It wasn't just the food they serve—so-called "fat" sandwiches containing various combinations of chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, French fries and sauces—or the fact that all this can be had (with a drink) for roughly $6 ... The grease trucks were Rutgers' town square, a marketplace for midnight munchies, a very simple measure that turns an otherwise unassuming parking lot into a makeshift gathering place for college students.

You'll find food truck courts in Philadelphia's University City, clustered around the campuses of Penn and Drexel. Empty parking lots in Downtown Los Angeles recently gave way to the city's first street food fair, managed by the nascent SoCal Mobile Food Vendors' Association.

Even in rainy Portland, multiple food truck courts have appeared on parking lots throughout the city. There are so many that there's even a blog documenting them.

Food trucks are rarely pretty, relying on cheap, portable materials like folding chairs and collapsible awnings to do their business. But they provide a number of important functions. They give entrepreneurs a way to open shop with little overhead. That keeps prices low, encouraging experimentation while making the food more accessible to customers. (In Portland, you can get a five-course Indian meal from a truck for $6.)

In a court, food trucks become a social space, not just a quick lunch. Combine them with other uses, like the bus stop adjacent to Rutgers' Grease Trucks, and you have a community center.

This may not work everywhere. Food truck courts need at least some foot traffic. After all, if you're using a parking lot, where would customers put their cars? Therefore, they should be in fairly dense places that people are going to anyway, and hopefully those places will have their own parking. Fenton Street Market is adjacent to dozens of established stores and restaurants all of which provide customers for each other and share public parking lots that have their own share of empty spaces.

We devote a surprising amount of land in East County, and across the region as a whole, to parking lots that are never fully used. We also have a dearth of places to hang out and, despite the economic recession, a dearth of affordable retail space for people with goods to sell. Food trucks seem like a way to kill two birds with one stone. They don't always move, but they're a great way to export different cultures, drive new ideas, and bring people together.