The City of North Vancouver is looking to quickly expand restaurant patio spaces and possibly allow people to enjoy a drink with their picnic in the park this summer.
We support this fully and suggest other municipalities do the same. It will give our restaurants and pubs a fighting chance of getting through COVID-19 shutdowns and it can also provide us a badly needed boost to our quality of life.
The risk of transmitting the virus while outside is demonstrably lower than it is indoors. This means our parks, plazas and public spaces will take on a new importance as we try to adjust to the COVID-19 world, especially with so many people not having backyards of their own. In Phase 2, we should be finding creative ways to safely make the most of them, while mitigating new concerns that arise.
There have been a number of liquor reforms in B.C. over recent years and yet you would still have to travel to the Middle East to find more restrictive alcohol laws.
When it comes to expanded or new restaurant patios, it raises the obvious question of limited space on the streetscape.
The obvious answer is curbside parking will have to go, at least temporarily. The North American public never responds well when they feel their free car storage is under threat, yet we pay big bucks to fly to European cities to enjoy their animated streets where people are the focus, not cars. And we’ve already seen the tradeoff successfully made on the first block of Lonsdale.
Who knows? We may decide we like the temporary changes so much, we choose to make them permanent.
Cheers to that.
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