Let CUP’s Making Policy Public project begin! As the graphic designer for one of the projects, I’m collaborating closely with CUP and The Street Vendor Project to create a fold-out poster distilling NYC’s complex vending laws into something concise and coherent. Sean Basinski, a lawyer and former vendor, founded The Street Vendor Project in 2001 as a legal advocacy group for NYC street vendors. Their organization has 600+ vendor members who sell food and merchandise on the sidewalks of New York.

We all met at Sean’s office yesterday and he pulled out a comical box containing heaps of pink tickets they’ve accumulated from local vendors. The violations are mostly for the physical position of vendors’ carts and tables, which must be certain distances from curbs, crosswalks, and building doors. Vendors are also frequently ticketed for not “conspicuously” wearing their vending license and for setting up shop on restricted streets. All these regulations are buried in official documents made up of legalese and heinous text formatting that seem set to get you. Check out this list of streets you’re not allowed to vend on:

Snap. Can the City be ticketed for bad formatting?

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Design, My projects, Urban Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.