LOS ANGELES — The complaint is loud, in the most literal sense. For years, residents of the apartments above Hollywood Boulevard and the merchants who work its sidewalks have asked the city to do something about the open-top tour vans that idle at the curb, engines running, while a guide narrates the neighborhood through a loudspeaker for the passengers up top.
On Tuesday a City Council committee took up a proposal that would, for the first time, set specific rules for the sightseeing vehicles that circle Hollywood — capping how long they may idle, steering their loading zones off the busiest blocks, and setting limits on amplified narration near residences. The measure is preliminary, directing city staff to draft an ordinance and return with details, but it is the furthest the perennial gripe has traveled toward becoming law.
The vans are a fixture of the corridor and, their operators argue, a legitimate business that brings visitors and their spending to Hollywood. There are several companies, running vehicles of various sizes, and on a busy weekend they can stack up three and four deep at the informal stops near Hollywood and Highland, waiting for passengers with the engine on and the tour running.
“I have nothing against tourism. Tourism pays my rent, indirectly,” said Farida Oyelaran, who manages a souvenir shop a block from one of the busiest pickup spots and spoke at the hearing. “But I have customers who cannot hear me over a loudspeaker telling forty strangers which hotel a movie star supposedly died in. And the exhaust sits in my doorway all afternoon.”
An operator who addressed the committee said the industry was being scapegoated for congestion it did not cause, and that responsible companies already turned off narration in residential stretches and shut down idling engines when they could. He warned that heavy-handed rules could push the smaller outfits out of business while the corridor’s real traffic problems went untouched.
City staff described the practical difficulty of the task. The vans share the curb with delivery trucks, ride-hailing cars, city buses and the general crush of Boulevard traffic, and any loading-zone changes ripple outward to all of them. Enforcement, staff acknowledged, is its own problem: an idling limit is only as good as the officer available to time it, and the corridor is not thick with officers to spare.
A representative from Councilmember Alicia Rendón’s office framed the proposal as a matter of balance — keeping a working tourist economy while giving the people who actually live and trade on the Boulevard some relief from its noise and fumes. The committee asked staff to consult the operators, the neighborhood councils and the transportation department, and to bring back a draft in the spring.
Whether the vans grow quieter will depend on rules that do not yet exist and enforcement that has never been abundant. Outside the hearing, a van rolled past the building with its narration going, a dozen phones raised toward the towers, and the sound of it carried a full block before the corner swallowed it.