Lithuania outdoor dining experiment per NYT

It's already starting in American cities

That design wouldn’t work very well in most of D.C. Each restaurant/storefront can get maybe two or properly distanced three tables on the sidewalk in front of it. We don’t have broad paved sidewalks the way European cities do except in a few select building courtyards, etc.

I'm all for it, but it would bring Americans' sense of entitlement to eat at restaurants during a pandemic into conflict with Americans' sense of entitlement to drive every goddamnwhere. There'd be blood in the streets.

I don't like the OP's picture. Those gas burners are really bad ecology and why hasn't that statue of an old white male been removed yet?

Dang, Lithuanian guys are hot.

Where do you live, OP? This is in every major city. Along with outdoor salons, gyms, nail shops.

Gyms?

Mixed feelings about this. It's one thing if a restaurant has it's own dedicated outdoor seating area, but the pic above makes it look like they are using public spaces to offer dining. Who is going to clean up all that mess and litter?

Where I live, many cities have granted restaurants with outdoor space the temporary leeway to extend their seating areas in public plazas (to make up for reductions in number of seats due to table spacing requirements which differ inside and outside. It doesn't work for every restaurant: the ones that had mostly inside seating plus a few small outside tables are still down in capacity if they are not on a plaza where they can expand; and the expansion is limited to not extend restaurant space to every bit of plazas but just to replace "lost" seating in the interim spacing requirements. It works reasonably well: when restaurants reopened they were very busy, too busy to not book ahead, then the urge to be out subsided and in August all was very quiet with people away for family holidays; in September there is some reasonable vigor to bars and restaurants, mostly those without outside spaces.

It's been going on since lockdowns were lifted in May, the protocols refined along the way.

We don't though have outdoor gyms, salons, and nail shops.

Lithuania idea? OP, this is being done all over the U.S. All NYC restaurants are doing this in front of their places. It's fine until it turns cold.

R6 and R10 please note that OP posted the original post back in early May at which point the US HAD NOT started putting up tables in from of their places. Yes, at this point it is relatively commonplace but it was not when the NYT article was written and posted here.