> The obvious point of comparison are most southern (and some northern) european countries that have lots of outdoor (often on-street) dining, apparently without much deleterious effect.

I love outdoor dining, but from my experiences walking in both SF and Paris, the sidewalks are typically much wider in Paris. They even have space for enormous newspaper kiosks [1]. Meanwhile, in the US, the structures typically encroach on an already crowded sidewalk [2].

Others have mentioned a car-centric culture, but there are plenty of cars in Paris too, it just seems bigger. I wonder if I can back this supposition up with actual street measurements.

Also, Paris for whatever reason seems to have way fewer visible problems with homelessness than SF. It's possible they are just keeping it away from the public eye though.

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[1] https://frenchmoments.eu/newspaper-kiosks-of-paris/

[2] https://ny.eater.com/2021/5/25/22452773/new-yorkers-debate-o...

I do think the space issue is a good distinction. And not ceding huge parts of the city to street parking is another one.

But there are crowded 'us city sized' sidewalks in plenty of places in Paris where the space to walk between tables probably wouldn't make accessible code in the US; too narrow and uneven and busy.

Here is a hip area comes to mind in paris [1]. it has those built out wooden platforms onto what used to be parking spaces like in the eater article. narrow sidewalks. Odd there are no people in the satellite I wonder if the most recent one was early pandemic. It was packed last I went.

One big difference is car size & number of cars per person. It's a lot lower than most US cities save a couple. [2]

They are decades ahead in trying to reclaim cities from cars & invest in alternative infrastructure. That area for example is now a 'pedestrian street' and they are doing great things taking back the seine. there were major differences & amazing improvements from when I went pre and during covid.

In contrast my city Denver also closed a couple streets that ran through parks during coviv (shouldn't have been built in the first place).

They added some roundabouts and other things to encourage a more bike/ped friendly space on just a couple roads.

Only to take them right back out... So infuriating. Paris used COVID to speed up and we seem to be going backwards. [3]

https://www.google.com/maps/dir//Maison+Sauvage+Saint-Germai...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/how-paris...

https://slate.com/business/2021/09/paris-cars-bicycles-walki...

> Also, Paris for whatever reason seems to have way fewer visible problems with homelessness than SF. It's possible they are just keeping it away from the public eye though.

While France isn't above trying to hide poverty, it's still not as prevalent an attitude as it is in Britain and the US.

I think the answer's pretty simple : the welfare and healthcare system is just better. It's harder to be homeless and addicted in France than the US. SF in particular seems to have a drug problem.

That seems like an argument for narrowing the streets to give more room over to pedestrians.

> Others have mentioned a car-centric culture, but there are plenty of cars in Paris too, it just seems bigger. I wonder if I can back this supposition up with actual street measurements.

I suspect you won't be able to back this up with actual street measurements and that they just make better use of the available space. We give a lot of space over to cars in the US.

Agreed. It would be interesting to see how those European cities do it. I don't recall feeling obstructed by it, the way I do in US cities recently (I don't mind it, but I notice it).

IME, in Europe, the outdoor dining is usually directly adjascent the restaurant (in the US, it's often on the curb side of the sidewalk), though that is really speculation based on limited experience. Perhaps that is actually on restaurant property, and they set back the indoor structure. Or perhaps European sidewalks were built with that capacity in mind.

Also, perhaps the US, usually more restrictive with alchohol, has been less accepting of drinking in public. It doesn't seem like a problem to me, but then I hardly ever see anyone drinking in public. A city block with lots of restaurants and drinkers?

> Sometimes, that asshole Chesterton put up a fence without a good reason at all.

I find that is very rarely the case, especially for rules widespread across the country. Usually 'no good reason' means 'no reason I know' or 'not a reason I care about'.

Something else to point out is that outdoor dining has positive externalities as well. Streets with lots of people on them sitting, watching, instagramming, are safer and better observed than empty streets or streets with just cars. The permitting process is so focused on preventing the negative that there is no advocate of the positive.

Why security again? Fresh air would do it. People being afraid constantly are in need of some serious punching, they can be afraid of that for all I care. Policies of the last decades were constantly focused to cater to schizophrenic needs.

Security isn't advocating something positive since it implies that you would need it.

Which would you rather walk down as a single woman, a street empty other than a single man or a street full of sidewalk cafes and people? While the safety could be argued to be more perceived than real, (though I doubt that, it’s city street smarts 101 not to walk down dark empty alleys in the middle of the night), that increase in people’s comfort leads to the positives, healthy vibrant street life, pleasant utilization of public space, and walkability.

Depends on location and country but I don't want to further the notion that it is unsafe for women to walk down a street alone because it is not the reality in most modern societies.

Trying to accommodate irrational fears is often not helpful, it can even be abusive because you validate these fears. This is even a common mechanism to isolate people in abusive relationships. Don't go outside, there is danger in every dark alley!

Some other women might just try emphasize their vulnerability to fish for a protector. How evil of them, but hard to be angry about that.

If you always accommodate people for their comfort, you refuse them growth. As I said, it depends on the location. The locations that don't have the problem did not solve it by arbitrary security mechanisms.

> The permitting process is so focused on preventing the negative that there is no advocate of the positive.

How does it work?

It works that way because we have encoded agreed upon negatives into law and/or regulations. By contrast, the positives are still highly subjective and not broadly agreed upon.

So the actual process is dominated by "Does the project avoid X?", "Does the project ensure that Y cannot happen?", "Will the project ever exceed limit Z?" rather than "Does the project bring <positive-good> to its location?", because people have not yet agreed upon a clear definition of <positive-good> things. In contrast, the stuff to avoid makes itself known, and the stuff we can mostly agree on becomes part of our civic codes.

Related, the law usually compensates for government "takings" but doesn't work in reverse, except in a few places:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_capture

Residents of San Francisco have not been in my experience shy about drinking in public, or, for that matter, shooting fentanyl or defecating. These are rather everyday occurrences in the city, so I imagine people can handle some outdoor dining in restaurants too.

A good point, though many on HN aren't so happy about those outdoor activities.

Alas, they get worst of both worlds: the city government is doing little about those shooting heroin on the sidewalk, because it is too busy focusing on the scourge of urban life, that is, restaurants offering sidewalk dining.

The talking points are endlessly repeated, but does that make them true? What makes this true?

This is true, because the restaurants and other businesses actually have something to lose when they defy the petty tyranny of the city planning bureau. The bureau knows this, and it doesn’t like the idea of losing the power it has, so it comes down hard to punish those who do not kowtow to it.

On the other hand, the heroin addicts don’t really have anything to lose, other than freedom to roam around the city. Since city is not interested in depriving them of that freedom (as jailing the homeless addicts for disorderly conduct would be inhumane, according to San Franciscans), it has no tools to actually incentivize different behavior — it has no punishments left, and so it’s left powerless.

> The bureau knows this, and it doesn’t like the idea of losing the power it has,

I don't think government-bureaucracy-as-a-person-with-desires is a useful way to think or talk about this stuff.

Alas, the bureau is the people running it.

How about the law, their superiors, the politics, institutional culture, etc. No CEO has the power you ascribe to these people.

As the article hints at alcohol is likely the distinction between the two. It specifically calls out that liquor licenses are the beaucratic hurdle that is hardest to overcome.

I'd be interested to see Northeast/New England cities compared to California as well. My first guess would be that cities designed in the automobile era suffer more when they have to sacrifice the already limited pedestrian space they've got.

> My first guess would be that cities designed in the automobile era suffer more when they have to sacrifice the already limited pedestrian space they've got.

I think you have the right idea, but maybe turned around: Pre-automobile cities can have narrow streets and cram in space for cars, including driving and parking. Newer cities are built with roads (and sometimes sidewalks) at such capacity that the distance to cross them becomes a pedestrian obstacle - 'pedestrian unfriendly'.

Regardless, the question stands.

New England cities suffer, in this regard, from their Puritanical and Quaker roots. Public alcohol consumed in urban areas is generally a very bad idea because our forefathers were against it and codified it into law.

> What would be so different in the USA as to create a different outcome?

For one the roads and sidewalks were designed quite a bit differently.

Most other countries are far more well designed for foot traffic, where many places in us are more well designed for vehicles.

If you look at Europe in the '70s and '80s, it didn't look all that different from the US: just as car-centric, but just with fewer motorways running right through the centre of towns. The difference is that in much of Europe, people gradually started to wean themselves off of cars. These cities weren't "designed for foot traffic": people took actual steps to make them more pedestrian friendly after being very, very car-centric for a long time. The US and Canada can and should do the same.

Many European cities have pedestrian-only central squares or plazas that are hundreds of years old.

A couple decades ago there were cars in most of those plazas.

Actual steps were taken to change that.

You assume that there wasn't a period of several decades where many of those squares and plazas didn't have roads running though them, and needed to be reclaimed from cars, much as streets in general needed to be. That assumption would be wrong.

That's only a tiny part of a city.

I wouldn't know about that. I have been in many Southern European cities and I have been annoyed often by dining spaces taking over the sidewalk or even the whole street. But I agree that most of the culprits are just some small areas of the city and the rest is mostly fine.

I don't know California enough to compare. From the comments it seems worse.