Every day between May and October, from noon to ten or eleven at night, an ice cream truck drives through my neighborhood. It has all the persistence and inevitability of rats in the subway, with the considerable added aggravation that it's loud and pollutes the air.

Of all retail platforms in New York City, the common ice cream truck is perhaps the most inefficient and the most degrading to the common interest. This particular example, which I suspect is common enough elsewhere in the Five Boroughs, is everywhere in the summer, advertising its presence through an incredibly loud, endlessly repetitive tinny jingle broadcast from speakers inevitably turned up to full volume. In my neighborhood, if it's summer, you'll get at least ten hours of the Mister Softee [1] jingle at full blast during daylight hours.

During their tours, ice cream trucks seem never to shut off their engines; and they can't, because they rely on electricity to prepare and sell an incredibly perishable commodity. These are heavy vehicles, needless to say, and if you've ever stood near one of them, you'll have some idea of the clouds of carcinogenic exhaust they produce.

What I've also seen, and suspect is common, is this: these trucks tend to park in front of neighborhood cafés, delis, and so on and so forth, places that are there year-round and form a part of the community, and try to lure customers away from these neighborhood shops. Needless to say, the thing also parks in front of schools, much to the aggravation of parents and in violation [2] of the City Noise Code.

There are better ways to sell ice cream, ways that don't involve air pollution, noise pollution, and preying on local businesses. Such as, say, franchising the machines that produce the stuff - and it's not as if it has any nutritional value - to local businesses.

Astonishingly enough, the new City Noise Code, effective July 1st, should solve at least the noise problem [3].

Even Mister Softee will have to keep it down: The ice-cream chain must now stop playing its maddening jingle — the tinkling tune that gets stuck in your head — when the trucks are stopped in residential areas.

July 1st can't come soon enough for this neighborhood. The other problems this particular form of vending creates, we'll just have to live with.

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