Drive-Thrus Are Booming. Why Are Cities Banning Them?
Drive-thru windows have made a massive comeback, and—much like Zoom, remote work, and grocery delivery services—they show no signs of retreating in popularity in the post-pandemic world. The move toward drive-thrus has proven to be a sustained shift in consumer behavior, so naturally, the government has stepped in to do what it does best: regulate, restrict, and ban.
Last year, The New York Times reported on the post-pandemic durability of drive-thrus, noting that their traffic increased by 30 percent from 2019 to 2022, showing that Americans preferred staying in their cars even after the public health emergency began to wane. It’s unremarkable that drive-thrus accounted for 70 percent of fast-service restaurant sales during the time of social distancing rules, but even with the public health emergency in the rearview mirror, two-thirds of fast-food transactions still happen in the drive-thru lane.
Researchers at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management used cellphone data to track the average time spent at McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Starbucks—which make up roughly 10 percent of all fast-food stores in the U.S—and have confirmed that short drive-thru visits increased during COVID and stayed up; longer sit-down visits to the same restaurants went down and stayed down.
Yet even while Gen Zers are frequenting drive-thrus and filming their visits for a TikTok trend, city governments are veering hard in the other direction. Nearly every month, news comes of another city moving to ban new drive-thrus. Minneapolis kicked off the trend in 2019 by banning new drive-thru windows citywide. In 2023, Atlanta followed suit with its own ban on new drive-thrus within a half-mile of the Beltline. Cities such as St. Paul, Minnesota, and Annapolis, Maryland, have recently jumped on the bandwagon with proposed bans.
Whereas prior attempts to curb fast-food culture centered on fighting obesity, today’s rationale is different: traffic congestion and efforts to promote walkability. Planners bemoan the traffic snarls caused by long lines of cars waiting for their Starbucks or Chick-fil-A fix and argue that the automobile-centric design of drive-thrus undermines efforts to promote alternative forms of mobility like biking, walking, and public transit.
For modern urban planners, walkability is the goal. “The more drive-thrus you build, the more car-centric you become—as opposed to something that has more mobility options,” said Keba Samuel, chair of the Charlotte Planning Commission in North Carolina. “It doesn’t make sense to have this multi-billion investment in light rail and still encourage an auto-centric environment. It’s contradictory.”
In other words, light rail is in, drive-thr
Article from Reason.com
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