Al fresco platforms: expanding café dining to…former parking spaces? Permanently?

It’s been a mere two weeks since I explored the sacrifice of on-street parking spaces for transportation enhancements in a Washington DC neighborhood.  And here I go at it again.  Why should I delve into the subject so soon?  Well, this time around, it’s not quite identical: instead of bike lanes, the enhancement is more pedestrian-scaled, and it’s not even about transport, or getting around.  It’s about staying put and enjoying a leisure experience in the outdoor space near a business, “enhanced” through outdoor dining extended out into the street, into what I can only reasonably call al fresco platforms.  Like the photo below, on Wisconsin Avenue NW in the busy Georgetown neighborhood.

It’s not complicated.  The folks sitting at the Martin’s Tavern, the institution on the corner, are lounging in what used to be the turn radius for vehicles leaving N Street NW to turn right onto Wisconsin Avenue NW.  Since 2020, however, social distancing measures during the peak of COVID-19 prompted cities to allow restaurants more outdoor seating, in large part to compensate for the reduction of tables indoors.  Martin’s Tavern has long enjoyed a few café spaces on N Street NW, the less busy local road.  With the new outdoor seating measures (whose temporary nature is increasingly dubious), the eatery now features about a half-dozen additional tables, even as the City lifted indoor dining limitations over a year ago.  Jersey barriers protect patrons from the heavier traffic on Wisconsin Avenue NW.  Martin’s Tavern has no reason to forfeit the spaces; they essentially give the restaurant the opportunity to serve 20-30 more people during peak hours and favorable weather.  And nobody else is really losing anything except a more generous turn radius for vehicles; with that radius gone, motorists proceed more slowly through their right turns, improving safety for everyone.  It’s a win-win.

The City seems to be hooked on outdoor dining provisions, at least in Georgetown.  The investment is a wee bit more than simply plopping some Jersey barriers in the right-of-way.  Here’s another stretch of Wisconsin Avenue NW:

Not only did the City add those protective barriers, but it built a wooden al fresco platform, eliminating the change in grade at the curb, thereby making the outdoor dining friendly to people in wheelchairs.  It’s a bonus move.  But how do I know this is the City doing this, and not simply private restaurant owners taking advantage of City legislation that allowed them to claim this portion of the right-of-way?

I don’t really know; I just have my suspicions, not only because of the uniformity in appearance of these protected al fresco platforms, but because of what the City has sacrificed.

The green sign on the light pole is ParkMobile, the smart phone app popular across the country for paying for on-street parking, increasingly as an alternative to parking meters.  Unlike the example at Martin’s Tavern, the spaces here used to serve as on-street parking.  Not any more.  I’m not yet ready to excoriate the City for the decision: after nearly two years of punishing COVID restrictions that forced the closure of tens of thousands of restaurants nationwide, the restaurants deserved relief afforded through some additional outdoor seating, which might not otherwise have been available on narrow sidewalks like the segment of Wisconsin Avenue NW featured above.  And it was a somewhat familiar practice even before COVID; I noted an example in the DC suburb of Takoma Park back in 2019.

That said, every top-down initiative yields its unintended consequences.  I would imagine the City would have to subsidize ParkMobile for on-street spaces lost.  As much as this improves the capitalization for these storefront restaurants, it reduces it for the parking app company, which expected a certain number of spaces as part of its contractual T&C with the City.  A few spaces might seem like a drop in the bucket, but good luck using “drop” and “bucket” as a rationale for the bean counters at ParkMobile.  They’re going to expect compensation for those spaces eliminated.

The bigger concern I have is whether these provisions are yielding long-term benefits in luring tenants to vacant storefronts along Wisconsin Avenue NW.  As lucrative of a shopping destination as Georgetown is, the neighborhood clearly suffered from the aftermath of COVID restrictions just like everywhere else.  Take that initial photo.  The larger white building immediately to the left of Martin’s Tavern hosted the national clothing chain The Gap as recently as the fall of 2021.  I’m hardly going to claim that the installation of al fresco dining was the straw that broke the camel’s back; after all, The Gap Inc. has been shedding stores for years.  But the City’s introduction of protected al fresco platforms did squelch at least a couple on-street spaces immediately in front of this Gap location.  And a clothing retailer doesn’t benefit from al fresco space, unless it wants to promote some of its wares in the open air.  Not likely.

The Gap isn’t the only vacancy to emerge since the City’s decision to install al fresco platforms.  If I pivot 180 degrees from the previous two photos, one can witness how comprehensive this approach really has become.

The elevated al fresco platforms continue, creating continuity with the sidewalk and eliminating the effect of a curb.  The Jersey barriers continue as well, with the only break occurring at the crosswalk.  A particularly sensitive detail is the inclusion of Tactile Walking Surface Indicators—those evenly-spaced raised bumps that alert blind and visually impaired persons when they’re leaving a domain protected from cars to one that is exposed.  The City even installed some hefty inverted U-shape bike locks into the al fresco platforms.

This level of investment not only reveals how carefully thought out this solution has been, but it suggests these improvements are here to stay.  In many respects, it could become an amenity that the City hopes to lure more restaurant tenants; after all, al fresco platforms almost guarantee they have more space to serve patrons, if they want it.  But how well is it working?  Notice the entrance to the building immediately to the left of that crosswalk.

The previous tenant was The High Street Café, but it appears to have been a short-lived enterprise: the Google Street View archived photo from September 2021 suggests it had already thrown in the towel, and the last time the location previously claimed a stable, long-term tenant was in 2017, with the Italian restaurant Paolo’s.  The High Street Café lasted less than three years.  I can’t yet call the location “snake bit”, but if the al fresco platforms are helping, they sure ain’t showing it.  These closures make me think of a Streetsblog article from a few months ago, where a long-time hardware store owner claimed the installation of high-grade bike lanes gobbled the few on-street parking spaces in front of his business, which in turn killed his foot traffic and forced him to close.  I have a sneaking suspicion the hardware store owner’s jeremiad was a tad simplistic, though I am not sympathetic to the snarky, dismissive tone that the Streetsblog writer assumes toward the closure of a long-term small business.

Judging from the small biz environment in Georgetown, the efficacy of the al fresco platforms is spotty at best.  

Throughout the length of Wisconsin Avenue NW, I encountered formidable stretches of where investment achieves nothing.  Either the restaurant hasn’t taken up the City’s offer to seat people outdoors (not likely) or the storefront features a retail tenant that doesn’t benefit from it (far more likely).  In fact, it’s almost certain that a clothing boutique stands to lose out from sacrificing those simple off-street parking spaces out front.  And clothing stores quite a bit smaller than Gap Inc. prevail along Wisconsin Avenue. In an era where the Internet comprises an increasingly large share of how people shop for durable goods, is it really a good idea to put additional strain on bricks-and-mortar clothing stores?

These alfresco platforms represent a scythe-like sweep of a solution when a scalpel was probably better.  I concede that I may need to eat my words in two years, if the City’s outdoor dining permissiveness ultimately reduces the creeping vacancy levels on what has historically been a delightful pastiche of a commercial corridor—far more interesting in my opinion than M Street NW, Georgetown’s other busy main street.  Loathe as I am to defend parking twice in a single month, I sometimes wonder if this and the protected bike lanes of Foggy Bottom (which I covered a few weeks ago) reflect an allotted budget for streetscape improvements that was nearing its expiration date.  Use it or lose it, the City said to its bike/pedestrian planners.  So they found a blanket solution that just as easily could smother a good part of the commerce or institutions that they aim to help.  After all, on-street spaces parallel to the curb are the most space efficient and truly urban-friendly means of providing parking.

As for the smothering of small businesses, one can only hope, as is often the case, that I’m wrong.  Which is also often the case.