Rahm Wants To Bring Food Trucks To O'Hare And Midway Airports
By Anthony Todd in Food on Mar 29, 2017 7:46PM
Beavers Donuts / Facebook
Today, Mayor Rahm Emanuel introduced a new ordinance that may change your eating options at the airport. If the ordinance is approved, Chicago's food truck rules will be modified to allow food trucks to congregate at O'Hare and Midway airports.
The new ordinance, released Wednesday, modified Section 7-38-115 of the Municipal Code (which governs the operation of food trucks) in order to allow food trucks to work through the airports. How it does this is a tiny bit convoluted, so bear with us.
The general Chicago food truck ordinance has some restrictions in it, meant to assuage the concerns of brick and mortar restaurants and to avoid traffic concerns. The ordinance prevents food trucks from parking in any one site for more than two hours, and it prevents food trucks from parking within 200 feet of the entrance to a restaurant. This, supposedly, helps to prevent competition between food trucks (which have lower costs and, therefore, might have a business advantage) and more traditional restaurants.
The proposed new ordinance (which is embedded below), would specifically exempt food trucks that operate at designated parts of O'Hare and Midway from those two requirements. In other words, food trucks at the airport could park for longer than two hours and be close to restaurants; a necessity, since there isn't really anywhere at the airports that isn't within range of a restaurant.
However, don't get too excited about being able to pop outside the terminal and grab a great non-HMS Host meal just yet. The designated spots, according to the proposal, can't interfere with traffic and can't be inside an airport terminal. So, given the geography of the airports, we're not exactly sure where these food truck pens could end up. Perhaps they'll create a food truck food court in one of the parking areas, accessible to passengers but not blocking traffic?
At the least, this is yet another move to open up more of the city to food trucks, which is almost always a good thing. We'll keep an eye on this one to see if it passes and how it plays out.
Airport Food Truck Ordinance by artodd1 on Scribd