Eat Your Street

Oct 1

Providing Main Street businesses with the opportunity to expand through delivery platforms.

By: CivicWorks

Many main street businesses are feeling the sting of restrictive measures and grappling with the loss of patronage that once came with active, vibrant streets. In an effort to address public safety concerns, businesses have been required to maintain physical distancing between customers and limit overall capacity. As the new normal sets in and people begin venturing outside their homes, there is a need to adapt and balance social interaction with public health concerns to support economic resiliency on our Main Streets.

EatYourStreet is an app that supports local main street food services and hospitality operations, using public spaces and smartphone technology to safely expand business capacity at a hyper-localized scale. By utilizing existing public infrastructure, this concept can be easily implemented with little capital investment. By addressing public seating spaces, the app connects public space users with restaurants within walking-distance delivery service. Tables and/or seating are identified with wayfinding signage and connected via geolocated QR codes that direct users to the take-out menu and facilitate food delivery right to your seat.

We’ve identified two primary typologies:

1. Street Bar: on-street or on-sidewalk seating installations; and

2. Take-Out Park: pop-up seating on existing park space or underutilized/vacant lots.

EatYourStreet creates multiple zones of dining sprinkled throughout a Main Street area, generating an overlapping dining ecosystem while promoting and financially bolstering local restaurants. Restaurants may choose to participate in any identified dining zone within a walking radius of their choosing, allowing for efficient and direct in-house delivery.

Details:

Budget: In general, the budget for EatYourStreet is anticipated to be relatively small, with hard costs minimized through adaptation of existing public infrastructure (e.g., public benches, picnic tables, etc.). As scalability is a primary consideration for this concept, exact installation and maintenance costs are expected to vary based on the specific application and context of EatYourStreet dining zones (e.g., Take-Out Parks vs. Street Bars), which will largely depend on the measure of public realm enhancement required and the size of the dining zone in question. Costs associated with seating and any curb ramp installation are expected to be minimal, especially in light of the fact that many municipalities are providing financial support with these solutions during the pandemic. The costs associated with area and waste maintenance are anticipated to be supported by either the municipality, community groups, private landowners, or a combination of these and other actors. Costs associated with the development of the EatYourStreet app itself may also vary, depending on whether it exists as its own discrete platform, or if it is integrated with an existing food-service platform. The costs associated with the QR code plaques are anticipated to be comparatively low, with all-weather outdoor plaques being generally replicable, simple to manufacture, and easy to install on existing public infrastructure. By and large, numerous costs associated with the EatYourStreet concept could be supported by municipalities, community groups, private landowners, and/or Business Improvement Areas/Zones to further enable Main Street economies.

Materials and Fabrication: EatYourStreet will ideally utilize existing infrastructure, enhancing public spaces only where required. Therefore, the materials and fabrication will primarily include the addition of public seating and tables, as well as the QR code plaques. QR code plaques can be mass produced from a variety of all-weather materials, such as laser-etched aluminum plates. Public seating and tables are envisioned to be similar to what municipalities, community groups, and Business Improvement Areas / Zones have already installed: all-weather wooden, metal, or concrete units designed for universal access. These units simply need to be appropriately spaced to adhere to social distancing protocols. There is an additional opportunity for community groups to create semi-permanent seating that could be moved around for pop-up dining locations.

Installation and Other Services: The installation and provision of services related to EatYourStreet are expected to be relatively minor. The fundamental installation feature includes the QR code plaques, which are primarily anticipated to be bolted onto existing public infrastructure. Other installation features include additional public seating and waste, recycling and compost bins similar to, or the same as, already existing units. Waste and recycling collection services are proposed to be undertaken by municipalities, community groups, and / or Business Improvement Areas / Zones. As each scenario may require different actors, transferability and customizability of the EatYourStreet concept has been held as a central notion as to allow for easy implementation in a wide variety of contexts.