Restaurant casualties of COVID-19

[danbrotherston]

Acitta pid='79240' dateline='1587508539']

I usually have no patience for those who claim that LRT killed their business but for the Duke Food Block it may actually be somewhat true particularly because deliveries are so hard...

I think that it is mostly the lack of foot traffic along Duke St. I think that those restaurants have been surviving on lunch time traffic from the courthouse and other surrounding businesses. Most people walking along King St. probably wouldn't spontaneously decide to eat there.

   

There is a loading zone less than 55 meters from the farthest restaurant. If delivery really was the problem, then our delivery system is fundamentally broken, and we simply can't have downtowns.

More realistically I suspect that you're right, deliveries here are reasonable (for downtown, and in fact, better than other places in downtown, because this is actually a true loading zone, not parking that's usually filled with cars), and it is the lack of foot traffic that is the biggest challenge.

At the end of the day, DTK is still very small, it's basically just one street, maybe one or two cross streets, same with Uptown, Cambridge, Belmont Village. For better or for worse, unlike peer cities like London, we have distributed density nodes, instead of one larger core.