I can confirm that outdoor dining did, in fact, create a living hell for a blind friend of mine. I’m not opposed to outdoor dining, but I do think it needs to be scaled back a bit, maybe with an appropriate fee to the city.
Congestion pricing for everything is going to be my hill to die on. Public health is a form of infrastructure that costs more as places get more crowded.
I’ve also seen some outdoor dining that did make walking on the sidewalk very annoying – enough for me to walk on the street around it – and I certainly understand (and even sympathize a little) with a very NYC-kind of exaggeration to (sincerely) ask ‘Where are people supposed to walk?’. Carefully weaving thru what is effectively an outdoor restaurant does seem very different than walking on a sidewalk. And some blocks have much higher numbers of restaurants than most.
(I have a friend that’s very upset about it, but then they’re very upset about a lot of things that I tend to mostly ignore.)
I can confirm that outdoor dining did, in fact, create a living hell for a blind friend of mine. I’m not opposed to outdoor dining, but I do think it needs to be scaled back a bit, maybe with an appropriate fee to the city.
Blind I can see being an issue, yes. And I can totally see paying rent on the space.
Congestion pricing for everything is going to be my hill to die on. Public health is a form of infrastructure that costs more as places get more crowded.
I’ve also seen some outdoor dining that did make walking on the sidewalk very annoying – enough for me to walk on the street around it – and I certainly understand (and even sympathize a little) with a very NYC-kind of exaggeration to (sincerely) ask ‘Where are people supposed to walk?’. Carefully weaving thru what is effectively an outdoor restaurant does seem very different than walking on a sidewalk. And some blocks have much higher numbers of restaurants than most.
(I have a friend that’s very upset about it, but then they’re very upset about a lot of things that I tend to mostly ignore.)