NYC Outdoor Dining Tracker
a 2020 vision of public space
New Yorkers have been trapped in their tiny apartments for more than six months, facing another uncertain period of “working from home”. In a Times’ article, Polly Trottenberg, the city transportation commissioner, described that the outdoor dining program “has developed into one of the few bright spots in the pandemic.”
He also called it “a creative new vision of public space.”
Here is a data tracker on NYC open dining’s status quo. By closely monitoring the real-time Open Dining Restaurants application public dataset provided by DoT( Department of Transportation), the tracker wants to shield some lights on how restaurants are doing facing the uncertain future, and it also wants to alert the readers in advance on certain restaurants which are located in COVID hotspots.
Open Restaurant Applications is a dataset of applications from food service establishments seeking authorization to re-open under Phase Two of the State’s New York Forward Plan, and place outdoor seating in front of their business on the sidewalk and/or roadway. Restaurants already privately owned outdoor space, parking lots, balconies, terraces, open air rooftops space, or open air boats are not required to apply for approvals of outdoor dining.
The outdoor dining program was first introduced in June, when the City witnessed a great surge of applications. According to the real-time outdoor dinning restaurant tracker, the program has received 11258 applications by October 19, 2020. And the number is still growing.
After months of “cooling down”, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on September 25, 2020, that the program would be made permanent. New Yorkers might have never thought about moving their dinning areas from the cozy bar tables to another teeny tiny areas- sidewalks and roadways.
Data shows that in all five boroughs more than half of the restaurants applied for both sidewalk and roadway seatings, while only 360 restaurants can operate their outdoor businesses in open streets.
Sidewalk is the second popular type of seating. Manhattan has the highest rate of “open street application v.s. total application” rate (3.75%), followed by Brooklyn (3.39%). In comparison, Bronx only gets 1.74% of its total restaurants to hold their services free of vehicles and busy passers-by.
Every one in two restaurants in New York City participating in this outdoor dining program serve alcohol to their customers. Manhattan, without much surprise, has the highest rate of alcohol serving (76%), following by Staten Island which gets way more likely (74%) to provide alcoholic drinks than other boroughs such as Brooklyn (64%), Queens(62%), and Bronx (62%).
Where are the restaurants in the COVID hotspots?
A new surge of local cases results in emergence of local hotspots over the past few weeks. According to the Office of the Governor, designated “Red” , “Orange”, and “Yellow” zones covers 220 applied opening restaurants. By connecting two datasets together, 220 restaurants located on the same streets are being closely monitored.
Brooklyn restaurants located in Coney Island Ave, Avenue U, and Kings Highway are highly possibly under exposure. Queen’s Main Street is another
“dangerous spot” for outdoor dining for now. Diners should try to avoid visiting these places.
What is next?
Future analysis could include amore developed restaurant hotspots alerting system and its visual presentation.
Note
Data updated: Oct 19, 2020; Data source: NYC Open Data, Open Restaurant Applications; Code on R Studio. Contact sulinjoanna [a] gmail.com for suggestions and comments
