Vilnius Becomes an Open-Air Café — Emergency Street Dining During COVID-19

As Lithuania eased its first COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020, indoor dining remained restricted and Vilnius's medieval Old Town streets were too narrow to fit socially distanced tables. On 22-23 April 2020 Vilnius City Municipality, under Mayor Remigijus Šimašius, announced that cafés, bars and restaurants could use public squares, streets and courtyards for outdoor seating free of charge for the rest of 2020, provided tables kept two metres apart and stayed at least one metre from pedestrian paths.
Eighteen public spaces, including the UNESCO-listed Cathedral Square, were opened on the first day. Demand was immediate: the municipality received 151 applications in a single working day, and more than 160 cafés, bars and restaurants ultimately took up outdoor pitches. A complementary voucher scheme (talonai.lt) saw 142 local businesses register and 632 vouchers worth roughly €9,200 purchased to support the hospitality sector, alongside separate gift vouchers for medical workers.
The scheme kept much of Vilnius's hospitality sector trading through a period when indoor capacity was constrained, and was documented by the OECD's Observatory of Public Sector Innovation as an exportable COVID-19 response and covered internationally by outlets including the CBC and Euronews. No independent economic evaluation of the scheme's effect on business survival or revenue has been published, so its impact is best supported by participation and uptake data rather than a rigorous outcome study; unlike the Milan and New Zealand programmes in this catalogue, it was framed and delivered as a time-limited emergency measure rather than a step toward permanent street redesign.

Read the full analysis: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/lithuania-covid-coronavirus-vilnius-restaurants-outdoors-1.5558666