John King, urban design writer for the San Francisco Chronicle isn't impressed by current "restaurant seating in the street" initiatives

-- "Restaurants are taking over parking spaces. Here are 6 ways to make them better" (pretty hard firewall, you might need to access this article through a public library database)

Few newspapers have urban design or architecture "beat" writers anymore. John King is an exception, and as always, he's great.

He's one of the first people to have written about the Rebar (now defunct) Parking Day initiative when it first launched in San Francisco in 2006.  More than a few of his pieces, including "Great architecture, clean streets, culture -- it must be Minneapolis" and "Opening Day Distraction Why the ballpark was a great idea, four years later," both published in 2005, I still reference, etc.

WRT the restaurant patios in the street (which I wrote about in June, "From more space to socially distance to a systematic program for pedestrian districts (Park City (Utah) Main Street Car Free on Sundays)"), his point is that in the SF area, restauranteurs aren't much concerned about aesthetics.  The current article is a follow up to an earlier piece from June.  From the article:

But as the parklet-like nooks proliferate — there probably are at least 100 in San Francisco alone — we’re seeing an ad hoc transformation of such commercial strips as Chestnut Street in the Marina, Valencia Street in the Mission and Green Street in North Beach.

Some are elaborate constructions. Others have a flimsy, spur-of-the moment air. Your table might be on a wooden platform, a carpet of artificial grass or stark, unadorned asphalt. Many have plastic or wooden partitions between widely spaced tables. Some — how shall I be polite about this — take a dangerously lax approach to the need for safe social distance.

In a strange way, this is urban design for the pandemic age. Which means there’s a genuine need for basic standards that businesses should aspire to, no matter how ad hoc the tools. Otherwise, blocks could end up looking so cluttered and desperate that potential patrons won’t want to visit once the novelty wears off.

By contrast, I was struck by today's New York Times food section piece, "Chinatown Is Coming Back, One Noodle at a Time," which mentions the Rockwell Group's design initiative for outdoor restaurant spaces.  From the article:

Working with the city Department of Transportation, the firm looked in the five boroughs to identify “locations where the operators weren’t capable of rallying resources to help themselves,” in the words of David Rockwell, the firm’s founder.

“It’s been so terrifying to look at the empty city and see it just as hardware,” Mr. Rockwell said. “In theater, when there’s not a performance, the art form doesn’t exist. In some ways, cities are like that. Walking around the city you see these big gaping wounds. And you see these pockets where people have started to dine out.”

Planning a comprehensive approach vs. ad hoc responses.  The article makes an important point, that many individual restaurants lack the capacity to do a good job with this, so the Rockwell Group stepped in.

That to me is a purpose of urban planning and city government. Rather than erecting barriers, create the "infrastructure" necessary to facilitate the desired outcome.

About a dozen restaurants in Manhattan’s Chinatown can take advantage of a communal outdoor dining area. Credit: Jeenah Moon for The New York Times.

Rather than look at this as a lot by lot or individual restaurant by individual restaurant initiative, the Rockwell Group created a communal approach, where the tables provided are not specific to any one restaurant.

(Many NYC restaurants are going their own way regardless.)

Apparently, that's the difference between NYC and SF. But it's not likely that the NYC DOT was a leader on this--although in many areas both the NYC and SF transportation departments can be quite innovative.

My sense is that the initiative came from the civically engaged private sector in this case David Rockwell and the Rockwell Group ("Famed Designer Draws Up Plan to Save Restaurants Through Outdoor Dining," Bloomberg).

But the other difference between full street use and parking space use is what can be achieved by using the full street.  Just using the narrow width of the parking lane yields more limited options.

For better aesthetics, King calls for:

-- engaging with the neighborhood architecturally and place-wise in the design

-- security can be stylish (such as with these painted street barriers filled with water to ward off cars)
-- DIY is ok, provided aesthetics are a key consideration
-- Be creative
-- Care about what you do and how it looks
-- Don't fence the space off from public space