Dine-o-mite

We like outdoor dining, and so do New Yorkers. In a December 2020 poll (by an advocacy group devoted to remaking street spaces for pedestrians and bicyclists), 64% of voters in the five boroughs said they considered open-air restaurant seating an important use of curb space in their neighborhoods.

Everyone agrees that the emergency program launched in the worst of the pandemic needs surgery before something like it can be made permanent. That should include a more standardized design of the spaces to ensure they are safe, attractive and accessible to all, while allowing efficient cleaning of the streets and pedestrian access to the sidewalks. It should include unified oversight by one agency. And it should include some neighborhood-by-neighborhood input; the city need not implement a one-sizefits-all absolute entitlement to the curb.

But what the City Council ought not do is cabin the program to the warmer months, as online news outlet Streetsblog says local lawmakers intend to do. (A Council spokesman insists there’s no decision yet.)

It might sound like no big deal to turn street seating on and off each year, but it’s actually a very heavy lift. Requiring sheds to be perennially broken down and built back up means that restaurateurs will have to find somewhere to store them when the weather turns cold. It means few if any tables will be heated. It means restaurants may well have to fight each and every year for the right to make use of public space.

And good luck accurately defining what are warm-weather months in this age of climate change. A few days into 2023, it was 66 degrees.

We get that there are drawbacks to keeping dining sheds — which, when a permanent program rolls out, shouldn’t really be sheds at all — in place year-round. They make things a bit more complicated for buses, bicyclists and, yes, drivers searching for parking. But for many restaurants and neighborhoods, requiring outdoor dining to be seasonal is as good as barring it altogether. Let them eat cake outside.