As far as the outdoor dining goes, here in Cincinnati, I've found it more difficult for pedestrians than drivers. Tables are taking over sidewalks. In some areas sidewalks have been expanded to accommodate these. In the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood-a popular hotspot for restaurants and bars-a few side streets have been completely closed off to vehicular traffic in favor of outdoor dining, those are all side streets with little thru traffic to begin with. I think that's a better idea that putting dining spots in the middle of the street as shown in the first post.
More needs to be done to move away from depending on personal passenger cars as the primary or sole form of transportation in a city. I looked at a transit map of Manhattan and you can't go very far without finding a bus or train. Around here the has been a great increase in bad wrecks as well as pedestrians getting struck by vehicles (I, myself, was a victim of such nearly 5 years ago). Attempts have been made to make things safer and slow cars down. One such way has been to narrow larger two-way streets by putting in medians. That does cause a problem for emergency vehicles making them trapped behind traffic and unable to cross the opposite side of the street. One of the biggest problem areas in that respect (that I've personally observed) is the busy Martin Luther King Dr which is six lanes plus a median and is a busy corridor for ambulances as it connects both I-71 and I-75 and runs near three of the city's busiest hospitals. It is frequently full of cars especially at peak hours.
As far as roads being too narrow, the bigger problems, at least around here are #1, in Downtown and nearby neighborhoods the road structure is very old and weren't designed to hold as much traffic, or as big of vehicles as it does today making roads and lanes narrow. The other big problem is all of the Uber drivers and similar who park their cars in no-parking zones, or in some cases the middle of the lane of travel. That hinders traffic as a whole thus making it slower for emergency vehicles.
