New Day Dawns For Mobile Food Vendors

Food carts line the sidewalk from near the corner of Prospect and Sachem streets like a food court with no walls. The operators work busily to feed the summer trickle of hungry lunch goers while keeping one eye on the traffic at their back.

Welcome to the new way of mobile food cart life near Yale University’s Ingalls Rink and its new Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin residential colleges.

The last set of new rules governing food trucks and carts in the city slipped into effect last week. And the signs of change were noticeable, literally, with new signs indicating designated parking reserved strictly for food trucks on Prospect Street.

All mobile food carts that for years had made their home in the parking lot of the ice hockey rink, better known as the Yale Whale, were to be moved to the street by Aug. 15. Except not all were. And they won’t be until Oct. 15.

Six of the carts were still doing business in the lot because construction connected to Yale’s new residential colleges near the south side of Sachem Street is still underway. The rest were on the sidewalk.

And the growing pains of adjusting to the new rules also is underway for food cart vendors like Jorge Carrera of La Carreta and Josue Barbosa of Ali Baba’s Fusion. Their biggest complaint: The tightness of the designated positions on the sidewalk, parking, and safety.

“It’s too tight,” Barbosa said, echoing several of the cart operators trying to adjust to their new homes.

A New Order

Last Tuesday was the first time that carts with a designated spot on the north side of Sachem Street operated from the sidewalk, directly across from the parking lot where they used to ply their trade.

The city had given cart operators in the area until Tuesday — and now an extension until October — to move because of Yale’s ongoing construction. But in four areas of the city — downtown, on Cedar Street near the hospital and on Long Wharf — food trucks and carts had to adhere to new rules that went into effect July 1. Those areas have been dubbed ​“special vending districts” under city ordinance. (Read more about the new rules here.)

The Ali Baba cart, which Barbosa works for the owner, is nearly double the size of the majority of the carts near the Whale. Barbosa said he used to be able to drive it into the lot and unload it. Now it has to be brought to the ramp at the curb to get situated on the sidewalk. All that now has to be done either from a paid-for parking spot in one of the rink’s lots or from one of the city’s metered two-hour parking spots.

Carrera said that’s the choice between a $110 a month parking pass or a daily ticket for parking too long in one of the city’s metered spots.

“When you’re working out here you’re busy,” he said. ​“You don’t have time to stop what you’re doing to feed the meter.”

Parking is just another cost that food trucks and cart operators are absorbing. Cart operators on Sachem and Cedar Streets are paying $1,000 a year for the privilege of vending in those areas, while food trucks had to pony up $2,500. At Long Wharf, trucks pay an additional $500 a year for electricity.

Despite the grumblings that precipitated the new rules, Steve Fontana, the city’s deputy economic development director, said there are waiting lists to get into the special vending districts. The city received nearly 160 applications for the lottery of 91 spaces available in the four special districts and a mix of familiar trucks and carts and totally new ones secured spots.

And though some brick and mortar restaurants helped pave the road for greater regulation and higher fees for food trucks, the wait list for spots in the special vending districts include eatery names you know like Tomatillo Taco, Lalibela, The Halal Guys and Pitaziki.

The Prospect and Sachem vending district expanded from about 14 carts to 16 carts and two trucks and could expand further in the future, Fontana said. That could accommodate some of 12 carts waiting for a spot. The most coveted location, the ​“Food Truck Paradise” on Long Wharf, is home to 29 food trucks. It has the biggest waiting list with 35 trucks wanting in on the area.

The Cedar and Prospect districts added another six carts, going from 24 to 30, and two new spaces for the larger food trucks. But it still has a wait list of 16. And in downtown, there are about 20 designated spots for trucks and an undetermined number of carts. That waitlist is the shortest with just five trucks and three carts waiting for space.

Fontana said the city tried to create ​“nodes” or clusters of trucks slightly away from restaurants such as at the corner of Elm and College streets, where there will be five trucks. The clustering was designed also to help the food trucks actually attract more business through having more variety in each node.

“We think that what food trucks will be able to do is brand their location,” he said.

You will no longer find any food carts or trucks operating directly in the Broadway District. That was by design, Fontana said. The idea was to create identifiable places in the city where people can expect to find food trucks and carts, while not having those trucks and carts parked directly in front of brick and mortar restaurants, he said.

“We’re working on issues,” Fontana said. ​“Thankfully there are not as many issues as we thought, and I think when people get used to it, they’re going to like it.”

Growing Pains

Fontana said that the city has heard many of the concerns raised by vendors on Sachem Street, but the reality is that there isn’t much it can do. The carts had to return to the public right of way. They could not remain on Yale property.

The space is tight on the sidewalk because of the size of that sidewalk and because of the eight-foot allowance between each cart, Fontana said. The ordinance going forward requires a maximum cart length, but because some older, bigger carts were grandfathered into the new spaces, they might not have eight feet between them and the next cart.

“If you’re a 10-foot cart, you might have six feet,” he said. ​“What we had to do was work with signs, trees, infrastructure in the road, and how to best do this in a way that vendors would like.” The city also had to work with the fact that vendors wanted to be close to their old stomping grounds and weren’t interested in being spread all the way down to Sachem and Mansfield street because they thought they would be too far away from their customers, mainly Yale students.

To address the concerns about traffic, the city stripped the street near where the vendors operate keeping cars away from the curb. Vendors said they are grateful for the striping but are concerned about what happens when teams need to pull up and drop off coaches and players, or what happens to the sidewalk when it snows.

“There are a lot of concerns,” Fontana acknowledged. ​“We wanted to try to be fair between them, and we wanted to be fair to them. Honestly, there were folks who wanted to restrict the space between them further and I said no that’s not appropriate. We want to maximize the customer experience. We want to make it as safe as possible for the vendors so we need to have at least six feet between them, at least six and some case eight between them and, that’s consistent with down on Cedar Street. It might not be something they’re used to but if they go down and see their colleagues on Cedar Street, they’ll see something very similar to what they are going to experience.”

As for parking, Fontana suggested it’s a business expense that vendors on Cedar Street have been dealing with for years and have managed to figure out. Sachem Street vendors will have to do the same, he said.

“There’s no perfect solution,” he said.

While there might not be a perfect solution, mobile food vendors like Mike Deponte of the Sugar cupcake truck are making the best of the new rules.

He has worked with other food truck vendors to split time for spaces; he’s on Prospect Street only on Tuesdays. But he doesn’t have to worry about parking tickets anymore.

He said if there is a drawback, it’s that he can no longer park on certain streets, specifically Cedar Street, where he would pull up his truck of sweet treats at around 3 p.m. Around that time, shifts are changing and people are heading out of work and off to pick up their children from school or daycare. It was the perfect time for a sugar rush.

“I kind of miss Cedar Street,” the former New Haven letter carrier said wistfully. ​“They didn’t want any trucks there. Hopefully, we’ll find somewhere near Cedar.”

Fontana said, in fact, the city has found a metered space near Cedar that could work for Deponte.

“He’ll just have to feed the meter,” he said.