The city shouldn’t rush into expanding sidewalk seating areas in downtown Lawrence.

The expansion of sidewalk dining and drinking areas in downtown Lawrence deserves a comprehensive look.

Rather than simply rolling back the current requirement that businesses with sidewalk seating do at least 70 percent of their business in food and non-alcoholic beverages and seeing what happens, city officials should take a hard look at how many seating areas might be added and how they could affect the ambiance of downtown.

City officials say 20 downtown establishments currently have sidewalk seating areas. Eliminating the food and nonalcoholic beverage requirement would allow an estimated 20 to 30 more businesses to join the sidewalk dining ranks. What effect will that have on pedestrian traffic downtown? Dining and drinking establishments would be accommodated by the change but what about the retail businesses that are such an important part of the mix in Lawrence’s downtown?

While it’s true that the city owns the downtown sidewalks and could evict sidewalk seating at any time, experience tells us it will be much harder to retract permission for sidewalk seating than to carefully monitor its expansion before it occurs. It may be difficult to predict all the effects of expanded seating areas for downtown bars and restaurants, but there are a number of concerns.

One of those is the bottlenecks the seating areas create for pedestrian traffic downtown. If Lawrence had done what some other cities, such as Boulder, Colo., did and created a pedestrian mall in its downtown, there would be more room to accommodate sidewalk dining. However, Lawrence isn’t likely to give up traffic on Massachusetts Street, which means sidewalk space will continue to be limited.

Another concern is the ability to limit sidewalk dining and drinking to the designated areas. Especially in nice weather, it seems likely that large, perhaps unruly, crowds might become a regular feature outside some local establishments. What does that mean to the desirability and safety of downtown?

At the same time, it’s important to be fair to downtown restaurants and bars. Those with an outdoor seating area would seem to have an advantage in attracting customers under the new smoking ban while those without such an area might struggle to survive.

Too often, planning in Lawrence is done on a case-by-case basis rather than looking at the big picture and assessing the long-term implications of a policy change. In this case an effort to mitigate the effects of the City Commission’s earlier decision to ban smoking inside most public buildings might create new unintended consequences downtown.

The city’s Historic Resources Commission has recommended a moratorium on the expansion of sidewalk seating areas until guidelines for such areas can be approved. A short delay for that purpose seems reasonable and might give officials time to look at the long-range consequences of their decision before approving a measure that could vastly increase such areas downtown.