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Comment by DrScump | Hacker News Reader

"Most cities in the world allow for non-stationary selling. That means as long as you keep moving you won't be needing a permit."

Hardly. Many cities (essentially every city in the Bay Area, for example) either outright ban peddling on public property or thoroughfares or requires a license for it.

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Yeah. This gentleman (http://zoomcaffe.com/) lasted at the Mountain View Caltrain station for a few weeks before he got kicked out (so I heard). It was very welcome.

I actually found a reddit thread about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1wcg6f/caltrain_tr... .

I worked at Stanford in the dept which supported housing and dining. Concessions agreements and relationships have to be engaged and signed before setting up shop in an area, regardless of whether someone believes it to be "public." In this instance, it would have meant engaging smctd. [0] It seems like they don't have any sort of formal concessions process or outreach, which is business-unfriendly (uphill battle). Otherwise, the relationship will be adversarial / nonexistent and the business will be finished unless it can legally skirt on a technicality (by moving just far enough out of the muni authority's jurisdiction). There are certain municipalities / area which need certain types of permission... CalTrain land is not technically under the local city's jurisdiction... They like other U.S. transportation authorities have their own police and own rules, like Stanford (ZIP code 94305) and some other universities too.

0. http://www.smctd.com/

"Most cities in the world" and "every city in the Bay Area" are two total different things.

It baffles me sometimes that to many readers of Hacker News are so US centric.

He followed that with "for example." The Bay Area is one of the largest metros in the US, it's not an awful example. And he also said "many cities," not "most." I think you took snippets to present this in the worst way possible. Be charitable.

It seems as though it would cost several thousand dollars per year to be licensed to operate this in Toronto, Canada. Toronto is really struggling to work out a decent model for licensing food trucks and the like, and it seems as though being a mobile food vendor on a bike doesn't really fit in their models at the moment.

If it wasn't for that, i'd be all over this. $3000 for the basic bike is a steal, and I could totally see me doing this for a couple of days a week over the warmer months.

Most vs. many. You can't say "many cities I'm familiar with have policy X therefore most cities everywhere have policy X".

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