Change the
damn food
truck laws

An idea with receipts.

Like the street cleaning one, this started as a complaint people make constantly and privately. Unlike that one, it took about ten minutes to find out the complaint is measurably true — both councils publish their fees, and the gap is not subtle.

So the facts aren’t really in question. What’s being tested here is whether the appetite is. Because a fee schedule is one of the few things a council can change in an afternoon, and the only thing that usually stops it is nobody asking.

A shop fitout is a bet you can only place once.

Lease, bond, kitchen, extraction, grease trap, fitout, permits, staff. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and a personal guarantee, wagered on a hunch that people will like your food. Get it wrong and you don’t get a second go, and we all know the names of the places that got it wrong, because we all ate there once and meant to go back.

This is exactly the problem food trucks solved, everywhere in the world, about fifteen years ago. Lower overheads, lower risk, and — the part that actually matters — a way to test an idea in public before betting the house on it. Most great small venues now start in a trailer. The trailer isn’t the destination. It’s the proving ground, and a town with no proving ground ends up with no new venues.

Which is worth sitting with for a second. Every empty shopfront on Victoria Street is a room waiting for someone with an idea. And the cheapest way to find out whether that person’s idea is any good is to let them park a trailer on the street for a few hours and see if a queue forms.

Both councils publish this. Neither is hiding anything.

In the Shire of Dardanup — which starts a few kilometres from the Bunbury CBD and is functionally a suburb of the same town — a street trader’s licence is $88 to apply and $160 a year. Or $11 a day if you just want to try it. The Shire’s own application form lists $92 and $168; either schedule you read, the comparison holds.

In the City of Bunbury, an $87 application gets you a choice. A roaming licence is $501 a year. A stationary licence is $1,003 a year for one location — and $1,204 a year if that location is the CBD or Marlston Waterfront. Per location. Daily rates run $37 a day in the CBD against Dardanup’s $11.

So the same trailer, doing the same thing, in a town that is continuous with itself, faces a 7.5× difference in annual licence cost depending on which side of an invisible line it parks.

And the fee, it turns out, is the mild half of the problem.

Four clauses explain the whole thing.

Both councils govern this with a local law. Bunbury’s is the Public Places and Local Government Property Local Law 2020. Dardanup’s is the Activities in Thoroughfares and Public Places and Trading Local Law 2009. They were drafted eleven years apart and they are not the same document.

One. You nominate a place, singular.

Bunbury requires an application to “specify the location” for the licence, and then makes it an offence for a licensee to trade “in a place other than that specified in the licence”. Dardanup asks a trader to specify “the location or locations” — and its permit conditions can cover “the place, the part of the district, or the thoroughfare”. One word, plural, and the whole business model changes.

Two. There’s a 300-metre exclusion zone.

Bunbury’s conditions may limit a trading area to “not less the 300 metres from an established outlet selling similar goods”. Read that against Victoria Street, where there is an established outlet selling similar goods roughly every forty metres. A 300-metre radius doesn’t restrict where a food truck can park in the CBD. It removes the CBD.

Dardanup’s local law has no equivalent clause at all.

Three. The licence expires on a fixed date.

A Bunbury licence is valid “between the date of issue and the following 31 August”. A Dardanup permit is valid “for one year from the date on which it is issued”. Which means the value of Bunbury’s $1,204 annual licence depends entirely on what month you happen to apply — and if you want to start trading in winter, you are buying a very expensive few months.

Four. Noise is an offence, not a vibe.

A Bunbury licensee must not “create any noise or disturbance to the annoyance of nearby occupants or passers-by”. Fair enough at 11pm outside a house. But as drafted it also covers a speaker on a footpath at 6pm on a Friday, which is the exact thing that makes a row of trucks feel like somewhere to be rather than a queue in a car park.

None of this was designed to stop food trucks. It was written before food trucks were a thing anybody was thinking about, and it has simply never been revisited. That is not a scandal. It’s just what an old document does when nobody reads it against what the town needs now.

Let them park, let them stay, and let them park together.

Park anywhere sensible. One annual permit, not one permit per parking bay. If a spot is legal to park in and safe to trade from, it should be available. The whole point of a food truck is that it can go where the people are — a licence that pins it to a nominated square of asphalt has removed the only advantage it had.

Trade for as long or as short as you like. Two hours on a Thursday. All weekend. Six weeks and then never again because it didn’t work. That flexibility is the product. Locking a vendor into fixed hours at a fixed site turns a nimble business into a very small, very hot restaurant with no walls.

Let them park next to each other. This is the one that makes no sense at all. Two trucks side by side is somehow a festival requiring an event application, while two trucks a hundred metres apart is fine. Except a row of four trucks is the thing people actually drive into town for. Why does it require a permit and a committee to let that happen on a Friday?

Then go further and designate. Pick the spots. Friday to Sunday in the CBD, a defined area where multiple trucks are encouraged rather than tolerated. Power, bins, a few milk crates, someone’s speaker. Not an event — a standing arrangement people can rely on, which is the difference between a novelty and a habit.

People attract people. But people need an attraction.

Nobody drives into town to look at a street. They come for a reason, and then they walk. And while they’re walking they pass the retailer they’d forgotten about, and the pub they haven’t been to in a year, and the shop with the thing in the window. That is what activation actually is — not a banner and a stage, but a reason to be in a place, repeatedly, at a predictable time.

The cost-of-living part is not a footnote. For a family of five, a restaurant is a real decision weighed against the mortgage. A box of chips, free music and a walk through town is the same night out without the same arithmetic. Right now that option barely exists here, and it should.

And here’s the part the restaurants keep missing.

There is a hard limit to how many paper-wrapped burgers a person can eat standing up in a car park. Sooner or later — usually around the third weekend — somebody says “stuff this, let’s go somewhere with chairs.” And they walk fifty metres and discover a restaurant that has been quietly excellent for twenty-five years and that they had somehow never been to.

Food trucks don’t take that customer away. They’re the thing that brought them into town in the first place.

Said as someone who has run one.

The objection is coming and it deserves a straight answer, so here it is. You pay rent. You pay rates. You carry staff, insurance, compliance and a fitout you’re still paying off. Someone rocks up in a trailer with none of that and parks out the front. It feels unfair, and the feeling is real.

But look at what they’re actually doing. Prepping at home. Loading a van. Standing in a steel box in February, sweating, lugging their own supplies, serving out of a window into a cardboard tray with no dining room, no liquor licence, no repeat bookings and no roof when it rains. That is not an easier version of your job. It’s a harder one with a lower ceiling.

And if someone can beat your kitchen from inside a 2×4 trailer, the problem isn’t the trailer.

The honest version of this is that a struggling venue on Victoria Street is not struggling because of food trucks. It’s struggling because there aren’t enough people on Victoria Street. Those are opposite problems with opposite solutions, and one of them is fixable this year.

You were them once. At home, testing recipes, imagining strangers eating your food and liking it. Keeping the next one out doesn’t protect what you built — it just guarantees the street stays as quiet as it is now.

“What we really need is a big brewery to open here.”

Heard constantly, and it has the logic backwards. Nobody with a national brand and a finance committee opens a venue in a town to create demand. They open where demand is already visible, because that’s what the business case needs — proof that people show up, spend, and come back.

Which means the fastest route to the venue everyone says they want is not a letter to a brewery. It’s a street that’s visibly busy on a Friday night. Twenty trailers over two years, a few of them graduating into those empty shops, and the investment conversation changes on its own.

Local demand first. External investment follows. It has never once worked in the other order.