Hours left for a food van in central Ankara: decision 2024/99 voided the old routes

It is 07.40 on Atatürk Bulvarı. A van has pulled up against the kerb with its rear door open, and the driver is counting the stops still left on his delivery note. Twenty minutes remain before eight o'clock, and from that minute on a food-carrying van has no business on this boulevard; it cannot come back until ten.

Whether twenty minutes are enough depends on how the round was built. Two more stops and the day stays calm; short of that, the load stays in the vehicle and the next attempt slides to ten o'clock. The awkward part is that where those two hours are spent is a question for the food rules as much as for the traffic rules.

What the decision draws for the centre

Decision 2024/99 of the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality UKOME, dated 17.12.2024, sets out on page four, under the heading given to van-class vehicles, that food-carrying vans may not enter or leave central avenues and boulevards such as Atatürk Bulvarı, GMK Bulvarı, Tunalı Hilmi, Cinnah, Hoşdere, Çankırı and Anafartalar between 08.00 and 10.00, and again between 15.00 and 21.00.

That leaves two windows. The daytime one runs from 10.00 to 15.00, five hours in all, and the night one from 21.00 until 08.00 the next morning, eleven hours long. The length of the night window looks reassuring until you check whether the receiving point is open at that hour; if it is closed, most of those eleven hours live on the plan and nowhere else.

For vans that carry no food, the morning ban on the same routes begins at 06.30, while the evening block stays the same. The only extra room granted to food traffic is an hour and a half in the morning, since from 15.00 to 21.00 both groups sit on one line.

For truck-class vehicles the table is tighter still. The same decision bans every heavy truck, food carriers included, from all roads in settled areas within the provincial boundary between 06.30 and 10.00 and between 16.00 and 20.30; where the trip cannot be avoided, a route permit has to be obtained from the Directorate of Transport.

On the avenues feeding the main squares the window closes almost entirely for trucks: entry to Atatürk Bulvarı, GMK Bulvarı, Cinnah, Ziya Gökalp, Meşrutiyet, Mithatpaşa, Milli Müdafaa, Necatibey, Çankırı, Anafartalar, Cumhuriyet and Çankaya Caddesi is barred from 06.30 to 22.00. After 22.00 a route permit is issued for compulsory transport, which turns truck work in the core of the city into night work.

Reading the document starts with deciding which line the vehicle falls under, since vans and trucks appear under separate headings with separate hours, and the class on the registration settles it. The next check is whether the street of the delivery point appears in the list at all. Opening the decision itself and reading page four, rather than the summary tables that travel from phone to phone, closes the argument about the round.

Read together, the two articles rule out the idea of idling with the engine and the refrigeration unit running until the window reopens. Unless the vehicle leaves the centre and returns to a store, during those hours the cold has to come from the load itself, which is why pre-chilled product, a container filled to the top and eutectic plates frozen in advance stop being an equipment preference and become part of the timetable.

When the timetable sets the round, the kit chosen for ice cream distribution has to be built around the same table.

The limit on those waiting hours is drawn by the food side. Article 5(1)(d) of the Turkish Food Codex Communiqué on Quick Frozen Foods (Communiqué No: 2014/47) requires -18 °C or below at every point of the product, and allows short-term rises of no more than 3 °C during transport, distribution and in retail display cabinets. Short-term is the operative phrase: waiting from 15.00, when the window shuts, until 21.00, when it opens again, does not fit inside it.

Turning a window into a number of stops is a division. The daytime window runs 300 minutes and the night one 660. Call the average time the door stays open at a stop d, and the driving time between stops s; the daytime round then holds roughly 300/(d+s) points. Feed your own d and s from your dispatch records into that fraction and you can see where the central round ends, and which points have to move past 21.00 or out of the centre altogether.

Change the regime and the table stays where it is while the tolerance of the load moves. Chilled product forgives the minutes spent with the door open more readily; on frozen goods the 3 °C allowance for a short rise is spent quickly. The decision says nothing about temperature and the Communiqué says nothing about traffic, so the two texts meet only inside the vehicle, and nobody plans that meeting on your behalf. A route permit will not repair a temperature record either.

The four lines of the table give the day its skeleton, and in the hours outside that skeleton the cold chain rests on whatever preparation went into the container beforehand.