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Comment by vec | Hacker News Reader

If by "nice things" you mean salmonella and grease fires, then sure.

Not to defend Boulder, specifically, but when thinking about regulations it's really easy to tally up "all" of the costs and benefits without crediting them for the nonexistent costs of the bad things that didn't happen.

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So instead of having each food truck pay for a monthly health inspection fee and having random health inspections every X time ( so that the cost of the health inspections is completely paid for by the food trucks), we simply outlaw them.

I'm not against regulation, I'm against broad, overbearing, and dumb regulation.

Asking for fire suppression systems in what is essentially a commercial kitchen on wheels is not unreasonable. Grease fires are really bad.

It’s just as easy easy to justify regulation by adding up all the imaginary costs that will be avoided.

Kitchen Fires and food poisoning are not imaginary.

How exactly does preparing food in the truck lead to food poisoning? Why doesn't your backyard grill need a fire suppression system?

1) If cooked food comes in contact with a surface that raw meat was prepped on, the cooked food can become tainted.

2) Most cities fire code say that your backyard grill is required to be a certain distance from the building structure (my local ordinance says 15ft), it just so happens that most people ignore the local ordinances. Those codes are b/c of grill fires.

Large portions of the world don't have these regulations and seems to be doing just fine. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore to name a few are full of food stands preparing food at the stand.

Funny you should mention Singapore, as the government moved all of the street hawkers to "hawker complexes" and there is a lot of regulation around food hygiene[1].

[1]: http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1637_201...

So, it's still easier to sell street food there than in Michigan?

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