More Sidewalk Cafes for Seattle?

If you wanted to open a side­walk cafe, the City just made it eas­ier and cheaper, despite con­cerns from the blind community.

Sev­eral blind peo­ple say the changes will impede mobil­ity for elderly peo­ple and peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties.… “We’ve got a ton of prob­lems on side­walks, and they want to make them worse,” said Doug Hildie. “It’s not that we can’t get around things, but the plan­ning seems to be with­out con­sid­er­a­tion for pedestrians.”

Still, side­walk cafes could bring safety and civil­ity to Colum­bia City (no small con­cern for South­east Seat­tle this year):

Joe Fugere, the owner of three Tutta Bella restau­rants, said hav­ing out­door din­ers reduced crime out­side his Colum­bia City loca­tion.… “We noticed a sig­nif­i­cant amount of crime [reported] by peo­ple using cell­phones and call­ing the police when they saw drug activ­ity across the street,” he said.

You know, Tutta Bella and the Wash­ing­ton State Depart­ment of Ser­vices for the Blind on S Alaska St are prac­ti­cally neigh­bors. Safety had been a con­cern for the lat­ter when they moved into the neigh­bor­hood 20 years ago.

The prob­lem with more side­walk cafes on Rainier Ave S is the ear-splitting traf­fic. Here’s a sce­nario for change: the City nar­rows the thor­ough­fare to three lanes, slow­ing traf­fic; widens the side­walks so that pedes­tri­ans can move freely; and restau­ra­teurs build out side­walk cafes so that crime declines.

I’ll drink to that.

UPDATE: Ixnay on nar­row­ing that thor­ough­fare. (hat tip: scott­plan at Colum­bia Citizens)

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