EDITORIAL: Big letdown after food trucks buildup
Maybe the fault for the disappointment lies with us — the local media.
When it was being proposed the city change its bylaws to allow food trucks to serve their wares by the roadside in midtown Toronto, we didn’t quite see how it would work.
We couldn’t see people putting up with more trucks joining the already-annoying delivery vans blocking streets near busy intersections.
Nor parking on crowded sidewalks near corners like Yonge and Eglinton.
Moreover, restaurants paying high rents in popular areas would not abide trucks dispensing food cheaply near them.
And the suggestion of one prominent truck operator that he and others could take over parts of our parking lots to create food-on-the-go courts seemed a non-starter also. We’re already short of parking without giving up swaths of it. And where are these available open parking lots anyway?
But advocates of food trucks in midtown were enthusiastic, and mobile food vendors promised they could work out solutions. Local residents we talked to were for the most part positive about the chance to have the same access to food trucks here that they do when visiting downtown.
And so we carried on reporting hopefully about political efforts to bring us this big-city convenience. Instead of demanding specifics: exactly how? exactly where?
And so the appropriate proposals were pushed through city council. But, as reported in this issue, now nothing. No food trucks. Nowhere to put them, it turns out.
No one had figured out exactly how to accomplish anything on this issue except how to get local hopes up — and then dashed.