The "car as a third space" is very real. I'm in a medium size European city and it's super common especially for younger folks, think under 30 mostly, where private space is limited due to the them and their friends living with parents or family or multiple housemates. The car then becomes their private space. Drive throughs are rare here but it's common to see people park, walk to a take away, get food and drive somewhere else to eat as a solo or group activity

I registered for a COVID test at a cvs nearby. When it was the day of I found out that location was only letting you take the test from the drive through. I had just totalled my car so I walked to the CVS and stood in the drive thru. I waited like 15 minutes for the lady in front of me to swab. When I got to the window they wouldn't give me a test because I wasn't in a car. Why the heck not? So I ended up just not getting tested. There was nobody else in the drive thru other than the lady in front of me, so I was pretty upset about that.

You're saying what needs to be said. 10 years ago we didn't have an In-n-Out here and ChickFilA had locations in the mall mostly. Now they're proliferating and the lines are out of control. Starbucks is still the worst offender though in terms of traffic spillage into drive lanes on main streets. As a totality, surely this is the sign of a sick society, on various levels. Thanks for your work and keep this kind of stuff coming!

I've never understood the appeal of drive thrus. It's basically volunteering to be in a traffic jam.

It's not just that fast food produces a lot of package waste...but also food waste. In order to serve food that fast, you have to pre-prepare it in large quantities. But a manager can't predict exact demand, so a lot of fast food gets thrown out. Much that is tossed isn't that bad...maybe just a bit dry or not warm enough. This could actually be used to feed the homeless and/or local pig farms.

One thing to note that I've seen pop up EVERYWHERE at drive thrus.... the lanes block your car in. It used to be that if you pulled into a drive thru, you could leave at any point. The new thing now is to place permanent curbs along the drive thru.... effectively keeping you captive until you reach the end. It's a sneaky way they force you to buy the food

Thanks for mentioning Minneapolis. There's absolutely no need for drive-thru restaurants in a decent walkable neighborhood, and I don't miss them at all. I can think of a few banks and pharmacies with tiny drive-thrus near me, but I've never seen them more full than the walk-in areas. I hope more cites ban new drive-thrus.

This is slowly becoming my favourite source of dry humour. Keep it up please.

20 years ago, an Adult video store moved into a former bank with a drive thru near my house. We all were hoping for the store would utilize this. They didn’t. RIP. 😢

Thanks, Dude. I was stunned back in 1989 in Charleston, W.Va., when I was on foot and the only place to buy food was a drive-thru (Popeye's Fried Chicken, as I recall). I walked up to the drive-thru and they refused to serve me because I was not in a car! Could that possibly be a thing? It makes me furious just thinking about it now, decades later. Jeez!

I come from a very small town, and I remember when we got a McDonalds the first thing I noticed was how much more litter there was along the streets.

So I have actually hated drive throughs since I got my drivers license; way before I was into "urbanism". It never made sense to me because my friends and I would order and when we get our food everyone want's to eat right away. I can't eat while I am driving so we end up parking in a parking lot somewhere to eat in a cramped car. so in the long run we might as well have just gone inside in the first place it's not like it was saving any time or anything.

I realized a few months ago that the only reasons I go to fast food restaurants is because I either "don't have time to cook" or "don't have energy to cook". Upon timing myself, I realized it takes me longer to buy something from the chikfila a half mile away than just staying home and making my own food. (significantly cheaper too). Even if the food tastes good, it's not worth it in so many ways.

The delivery driver model isn't nearly as bad, as one car can pick up multiple orders and use technology to find the most efficient route among each of them. The companies are also incentivized to deliver them as efficiently as possible to save money. Obviously walking or cycling is still better.

So glad litter was mentioned in this video. It really bothers me (+ many others) and I think it should be discussed more amongst the urbanist community. Our cities should look their best!

I spend a lot of time on the road for work. One thing I learned early on is to never enter a drive-thru when there's a 7-Eleven nearby. The food is cheaper, marginally healthier, and the lines are non-existent.

The underrated thing about chains are the quality control for sanitation. My ex worked for the health department and would complain about how gross a lot of independently owned restaurants were in the kitchen.

Some parts of America, especially southern states where liquor laws were historically looser, even have drive-through liquor stores, which just seems like a terrible idea. It was a shocker to me as a Californian.

The slurp-cut at 10:36 is majestic

I live in a US city that has very little of this (Seattle) so it's not a part of my daily life, but when I venture out on the road I like parking and going into the dining room. Recently I wandered into a McDonald's and I swear all the staff looked at me like I was crazy for coming in... like, they didn't know what to do and how to serve me as they were all set up for drive through only. A manager came out and was able to fulfill my order and I went out to the ditch behind the restaurant and ate my burger next to an abandoned shopping cart.

The Chick-FIl-A near me recently opened back up after renovating their drive-thru. They renovated it because the line would get so bad that it would block the street. They tried to reduce congestion by expanding the drive-thru, but as soon as it reopened it immediately became just as bad as before. Induced demand is a concept they can't seem to understand.

3-5 minutes time to process? I wish that was allowed at my first job (KFC). We were given two minutes from the time the car tripped the sensor until the car left the window. The managers made a huge deal about it. Didn't matter if the customer took almost the full two minutes just to say their order

Glad you touched base on this topic. This is near and dear to me since I design the parking lots for fast food establishments. Unfortunately, as a civil engineer, we are unable to change anything about the nature of these developments. We are confined to antiquated city parking minimums, poor setbacks, and the fast food client's demands to meet. This leads to the same, boring, car dependent designs. Every fast food project is copy/pasted to the next (only changing based on city codes) It breaks my heart knowing all of this.... While contributing to poor city development

So people go through a drive-thru to just park up in the carpark and eat there? That sounds crazy. Here in the UK, there are drive-thrus but usually you'd expect people drive home or are on the way to the office with their morning coffee, not this. Pretty sure most people in the UK, if they were planning to eat at the location would just get out of their cars and go into the restaurant at that point. Definitely drive-thrus should be forced to give service via the restaurant front end, drive-thru only sounds absolutely abysmal. I can only see distance being the issue people would eat in car park... not really a big issue in the UK I guess since the drive-thru would be in a reasonable driving distance so food would still be hot by time of getting home.

Drive-through banks actually pre-date drive through restaurants. I learned this when I studied abroad in the US. Naturally I exclaimed "drive through banking! That's ridiculous.". The person I was with then explained that drive through banking technically started first because restaurants tried drive-in waiter service first.

I'm a bit surprised you missed San Luis Obispo, they've had a ban on drive throughs since the 1980's (I believe). Growing up there, and being a college town that was mostly walkable, it never seemed to impact business .At the time I was in school, circa 2007, they had one of the busiest Taco Bells in the nation.

I'm a stormwater nerd, so I get excited when people mention things like runoff and impervious surfaces. Wondering if you'd ever make a video about stormwater management. I know Portland has done some cool projects with rain gardens and such. Top 10 green infrastructure projects in urban areas?

Yeah word to the wise. If you're ever going for fast food and you see a long line for the drive thru don't bank on it being faster to go inside yourself. Most places the workers will straight up ignore people at the front counter until the drive-thru dies down. The only exception to this that comes to mind is Chick-fil-A but really they're the exception to every fast food rule.

In Placentia, sort of the next town over from where I grew up, they had a law against drive-thru fast food joints, so they had maybe the only, certainly one of the only In-and-Out Burgers without a drive-thru window. Then McDonalds showed up and threw a lot of money around, getting the law changed. Now there is a drive-thru McDonalds directly across the street from the drive-thru-less In-And-Out. Needless to say, In-and-Out was not happy.

Hey, no idea if you'll see this: Have you ever noticed that in cities like Phoenix, AZ or with similar levels of modern car dependency, every intersection feels the same? I lived in AZ for a few years and almost every intersection in Phoenix had 1-2 gas stations on corners, a single story commercial center, and some sort of fast food or market. You drive and it's like they just change the brand or layout slightly.

Interestingly I find that parking the car, walking in and ordering is faster a lot of times than waiting in the drive thru queue. But that feels like a past life at this point. Here in NYC I can just walk to a restaurant instead.

Probably my first "urbanist" insight was when I was a kid, even then thinking that drive troughs were a bit odd. My main interaction with one was a McDonald's (because of course) on the end of the highstreet in Thrornleybank, a little village esque suburban area of Glasgow, Scotland. Its a small area, walkable but car infested becuase this is the UK, the McDonald's is wedged at the end of the main street between it and a school. It annoys me to no end how much McDonald's adverts focus on people in cars when most are placed in places like these. My number 1 "what would you do first day in power" policy has always been overnight ban on drive throughs. Complete ban. Figgure out what to do with the space just don't turn it into parking

I come for the urban planning topics. I stay for the dry, sardonic wit. 10 out of 10. Would drive through again.

In Minneapolis there is a Burger King that wants to reopen a location on Nicollet Ave. The city initially told them they can't have a drive-thru, but BK reminded that the city that the building was constructed before the ban took place. The city honored BK, but the location still hasn't reopened yet and by the looks of the building, it may not. Over in St. Paul, Starbucks opened a location at Snelling & Marshall Ave. Traffic got so bad, that it was nickname Snarshall Starbucks. They city went after Starbucks saying they need a traffic cop to help our or lose their permit for a drive-thru. After a while the Starbucks closed their drive-thru and they converted it an outdoor patio.

I read about a drive-thru funeral home, with a huge window you could drive past and view the body without ever leaving your car.

If we are short staffed, there isn't even a question of whether to close the drivethru or the lobby. The lobby will always be the one temporarily closed. People will walk up to the drivethru window, but our system isn't set up for that. We'll take the order, but it will inevitably reflect poorly on our statistics.

Just listened to a New York Times Daily podcast about mining nodules off the ocean floor for minerals to make batteries for electric cars to save the world. There was no discussion that maybe cars and everything that goes with them are the problem, not how they are powered. Please keep making more videos. I'll try to come up with some topics. I hope you are not running out of ideas. I enjoy your sarcasm, too. Keep it up.

If they lined these places along the street with no set back, they could easily create room in the back for a hidden back alleyway/substreet where they could host the same drive thru service without having to have these absurd number of curve-cuts and ghastly examples where the drive-tru even wraps in front of the place

Actually, as an American who loves French fries, I think I am qualified to comment on the worth of fast food drive thru. And basically, unless you sit down and immediately eat most fast food, it isn't worth eating. Why yes, I rarely use drive-thru or delivery of fast food. And the more you run the numbers on most fast food compared to homemade food, the only advantage to fast food is time. And even there, if you eat during high volume times, even time is not saved.

Talking about impervious surfaces, I'd love to see a video on the effect of car dependency on hydrology of urban creeks!

All of the past benefits of buying fast food are lost in my opinion. I use to love getting a quick tasty burger. Never been picky. But now i cant stomach any of the crap they sell. And the price has only gone up.

15:30 Yep. The volume of people in my town to eat has increased by a lot since local businesses outcompeted chains. I think Prezzo is the only chain now. People learnt to try new foods from different cultures, and yes it worked. That's why new foreign cafés/restaurants keep popping up here.

pleased to hear your nuanced take on health when it comes to the stuff we eat. a lot of the more important issues (sugar intake, empty calories,) get drowned out with fatphobic rhetoric. keep it up, man.

The amount of times I've had to cross a busy drive through to get to the entrance of a fast food restaurant is too many! Once my friend even had to do it with a stroller.

Cooked a frozen veggie burger for lunch at home while I listened to this welcomed episode. Appreciate that you offer wisdom about supporting the non-chain restaurants when you do need to eat on the road. I feel bad for our society that has for a large part, accepted eating out many times a week as normal. It is not folks.

Even more than the previous episode on power centres, you nailed the single biggest problem in urban planning; the fact that they are designed for the cars that drive there, not the people who live there. What's worse is that many of these areas lack access to grocery stores, so you have to drive to get food. Car culture is absolutely terrible, and I'm saying this as a disabled person who drives absolutely everywhere. Car ownership is still something used to discriminate against those who lack the political power to escape their circumstances, and drive throughs are just another example of that.

When I lived in Jersey City, as walkable as it was and while the vast majority of chains there weren't drive-thrus, some still were. Like the city's White Castle. Some I can make exceptions too like in the middle of a mall parking lot by NJ Route 440 like a Jollibee or by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel like a Burger King and a McDonald's. But the problem with White Castle is that it's neither of those. It's smack bang in the middle of mixed-use development in the busy Journal Square (which is a hub for tons of buses and the PATH train). Has its own dedicated tight parking lot and drive-thru. While I understand people like taking their "murder burgers" home, but they're better when they're just made. Meanwhile a Burger King on the other side of the city is in a shopping district within a residential neighborhood (The Heights) has their drive-thru in a parking lot that the city built big enough for drivers to park their cars and shop Central Ave. The drive-thru was placed in a way it wouldn't be bothersome for the locals. There's also a McDonald's on Central Ave, and that one doesn't even have a drive-thru!

I recently went to Jeddah and drive thrus are *everywhere* with the ATMs being at a height impossible to reach unless you're in a massive pickup truck. There was also a case in the UK where someone on a horse was refused service at a drive thru. What are the running costs of a horse compared to a car, I wonder

Drive-thru banks are weird, but in my first months in the US I was stunned to discover such thing as drive-thru dry cleaning.

Portland is actually ahead of the Netherlands in bike-friendliness at drive-thrus. As a teenager we'd regularly try to get something from the McDrive, but were almost always refused

Maid-Rite Sandwich Shop in Springfield, IL introduced America to drive-thru dinning in 1921.

I remember one time cycling to a drive-thru because all the other places were closed at night. There was a line of 15 cars wrapping around the building and I waited in that line, for at least 40-45 minutes for it to get to my order. Some people straight up took 5-10 minutes on their order, including people who had already been waiting that amount of time from *other* people ordering ahead of them! I got my order done in less than a minute. This was at 1-2AM.

I live in a walkable neighborhood and walked to my local fast food joint one night after a few drinks. They said the dining room was closed. That I needed to go home and drive back (tipsy) in my car.

OK, since you read and are doing this series, I have one for you. Small towns that were ruined by a stroad/car culture perhaps even became poor and how (if) any made a come back or how they could. Lessons for small town America. Towns not connected to a major city with

I work at fast food in Canada we got a drive thru for our A&W and we park cars when we can’t give the order quick enough or if there’s a wait, but man when I went to Southern California it’s so bad. I waited at a KFC drive thru line for almost 1 hour and it was not worth the wait. Though I prefer having a food court or one of those downtown fast food or any restaurant that you walk to than drive through. Surprisingly enough my A&W is beside a gas station but there are people who bike or walk to it, but in California it’s strictly driving only. 😊

Topic suggestion: I'd like to see your thoughts on signage. I live in the Netherlands, and the only thing we love more than we our nitpicky little rules is reminding eachother of those rules. Some streets are just a forest of signs that nobody reads anymore. Closely related is the amount of advertising that is allowed in certain areas.

During the pandemic a lot of states ordered all indoor dining to shut down. In my state a lot of fast food joints were operating as drive-thru only for over a year

Another factor is just how cheap fast food is in the US. When you can get a 1000 kilocalories for $5 in 20 minutes, it’s no wonder people choose to use them so frequently.

I live in Portland and never knew that. Thanks...now I have the sudden urge to try out the closest Taco Bell at 1:00 am on my bike.

The only Drive-thru that exists in my country is the McDrive, just because it tries to sell an "American Experience". Also, I think it says a lot that in the video, the parking spaces are blocked to allow for a longer queue for the drive-thru.

I don’t even speak English I just find your voice therapeutic

Dive Thrus are not that popular here in Brazil. There are even chains like McDonald’s that spend a lot of their money in publicity trying to make people use drive thrus. We have them in some fast food restaurants, but most people prefer to eat at the restaurant or order the food at home. The idea of eating while you’re in a moving car is completely weird.

I used to be a supervisor at McDonald’s, the drive through was 85% of business. Drive through metrics is how we were incentivized, even if it was out of our control.

I advocate at my city level for allowing development of more corner stores further from the "core" of the city in residential neighborhoods that service those neighborhoods more specifically, but my city in all of its planning documents only focuses on poaching traffic from the I-5 that runs through it (and also makes it hell to get from one side to another if you're on foot.)

As an urban dweller for the last 25 years (and a pedestrian for most of it), it makes me cringe every time I end up in the suburbs. They just get sprawlier and sprawlier as the decades go on. I love your channel and all of the light you shed on how our land use affects us as individuals and as a planet. "Take Your Fries And Leave" from Henry Grabar Slate is a great share that everyone should read.

Around 12:30 you mentioned it would be great for anyone to live somewhere you can easily walk or bike to a place with good food and it reminded me of how many youtube channel have hello fresh (a company that provides recipes and deliver portioned food at home) as a sponsor. It seems weird to me that people need someone to make the groceries for them.

Fun fact: When I use to work at Starbucks. The drive thru stores make at least twice, sometimes thrice as much compared to the regular cafes. Then the district managers just focused on closing stand alone cafes and focused more on drive thrus because of the high sales volume.

Atlanta: "Hold My beer" Proceeds to constructing a Drive Thru Chic-Fil-A in at the intersection of two high traffic corridors in Old Fourth Ward which needs to become more pedestrian friendly and walkable. It's also right up the street from a major walking trail which attracts hundreds if not thousands on any given beautiful weekend.

When double lane drive thrus started cropping up I remember thinking why stop here why not put two of every restaurant right next to each other and then continuing outward until all of America is Burger King

Drive thru mcd’s down the block in Oakland (depressingly close to downtown) constantly has a queue spilling out into the street, backing up traffic.

Thanks for always providing good locals vegas content

And topic suggestion: what cities have done to incentivize the redevelopment of aging/derelict large consumers of downtown land. Such as: convention centers, coliseums, etc.

Considering that there are a couple other KZfaqrs who film themselves going food delivery on bike/e-bikes with "pick up 0.7 miles away" and "drop off 1 mile away", these drive-thru places know their clientele.

I would like to mention all the pandemic restrictions that cut off walkers like myself when they were in place. It's like they didn't plan for us at all. Up to the NATIONAL level, too. Fortunately, I love in a location that is reasonably walkable, thank goodness 😀!

I worked at a drive-thru bank in 1988, in Rhode Island. I don’t remember any drive-thru food places back then. In the 1950s there were hamburger joints where you could park and a waitress would take your order and bring it to your car (see the sitcom Happy Days).

My big thought was maybe just to push for a limited commercial allowance for residential neighborhoods. We can't have a walkable neighborhood without a place to walk to. Maybe you can make a video to help people get started with how to approach their local council.

I'm more concerned about what they do AFTER they leave the drive thru. Cars have become restaurants, make up room, phone booths, library, and anything else but driving a car. Very few will get their order and find a parking space to eat. They tend to balance the fries on the console and keep the lettuce from the burger from falling on their shirt, and get the soda that pops up thru the straw hole.

It’s fascinating how different drive through culture is over in the US, I live in the UK and we do have drivethrus here but they seem to be used differently, the biggest one I can think of near here and the only one I’ve personally used around my town is a McDonald’s with both a seating area and a drivethru that I’ve used several times even though I’ve never eaten in the car, that just seems so gross, if we use the drivethru it’s almost always because we’re driving home and need a quick dinner, you drive through and grab your meal then drive hone and eat there. For years that’s what we did and I always just assumed that was what they were for, I never realised how many people buy food and eat in their car, then drive home with their greasy hands on the wheel, that just seems far too gross for me, I’d always prefer to sit in or drive elsewhere. It seems like they’re rarely used here the same way as in the US, they’re for getting a meal to eat elsewhere without needing to stop and go through the hassle of parking. The road layouts are different too, most drive throughs here aren’t placed along town roads or stroads (the latter don’t seem to exist here that often), they’re usually either placed in motorway service stations with slip lanes to take you off the motorway and into the service station area to reduce traffic, or they’re placed on smaller roads near high traffic dual carriageways so you aren’t blocking the main road with lots of entrances and exits for the drivethrus.

I'm so glad that in Bellevue/overlake area of Seattle suburbs, we got a dicks "drive in" at crossroads mall but it's actually just a big walk up with a covered lit roof. It's beautiful.

Ive never understood drive thrus. You want to put greasy food on your car seat and have it leave that weird smell in your car? 95% of the time when theres an option Ill go into the store

Where I am in Australia we have this problem too, and some times the queue get pretty long at drive through. I just find it easier to walk in normally, or even better, if I already know what I want, order ahead and walk in. Though the thing I can't understand is the sprawling parking shopping areas with plenty of restaurant but with a handful of them also having drive-throughs, which can be a headache if some cars are ordering from multiple drive-throughs. Surely it would make sense to just park and walk to each of them, and this would give an added bonus to the restaurants included in these places that doesn't have a drive-through, as the customers would also consider them a food option if they're not just driving through. Pros and cons to people living to these areas though, they get the benefit of food and shopping options without having to drive to them, but at the same time have to live with the traffic.

"Who's to say it's wrong...?" only goes so far, though. When people's preferences do in fact do serious damage to other people and the climate, well, ya know, it's at least a little wrong. And could we at least *stop subsidizing* those preferences that are doing so much damage to other people and the planet? So I guess it's not wrong to *want* complete convenience in every aspect of our lives. But it's pretty damn wrong to constantly indulge that selfishness and demand that the rest of the world subsidize it.

Loving that he shows a Burger King planning doc that looks like a vintage 1910s Automat, with the voiceover "Is this progress?"

The "Consistency" of fast food chains is a great feature if you're driving through a sketchy neighborhood you've never been to before. But how often do you do that? Unless you're some kind of long-haul deliveryman, maybe one or two times a year? If you live in a place, it takes very little effort to figure out where the good food is.

"Lines are good to a point." So are full parking lots. My friend used to live in a mixed use building. It had two apartments, an old barn (empty) and a small consignment children's clothing store. There were 5-6 parking spots up front, and a few more in back. The store had been empty for a while, and my friend's place was the local hangout. Usually 4-5 us would be over there. We'd park out front, but when the consignment shop opened we got a complaint from the landlord that we were taking all their spaces. The shop was doing great business. Okay, no problem. We started parking in back. Suddenly the 5-6 slots were empty... and suddenly the shop didn't look like the place to be. They went from having 1-2 cars parking there (in addition to our cars) to having one to two cars parked their in the whole week. They only lasted a while, moving to a smaller spot. Another weird urban planning thing... there is a 3 restaurant enclosed 'mall' downtown. Think something like those big gas stations that have a couple fast food places in them, only this place doesn't have a gas station attached. It faces the sidewalk and although the main road is pretty built up, 2 lanes each way, the sidewalks are wide on both sides of the road and their are decent crosswalks. The three restaurants- a Dunkin Donuts, a Subway and a Chinese place, share a dining room and bathrooms. I always kind of liked the idea of multi-restaurant dining rooms... one friend wants one thing, another wants something else... But the silliest of things seems to make it a miserable place to eat... they haven't figured out to make capitalism work when it comes to bussing the tables and keeping the area clean. Since people can sit anywhere they want all three restaurants play chicken with each other. No one wants to waste their time cleaning the tables. They figure if they wait long enough one of the other restaurants will do it. If there was a couple more restaurants in there maybe the owners could pool their money and hire a cleaner per shift. If one of the restaurants was the landlord maybe whose job it was could be negotiated in the lease with penalties for not doing it. As it is, 3 high volume (if questionably healthy) food places have terrible dining experiences, despite having a fair amount of dining space and it being in all of their best interest to keep it clean. I've seen similar problems with open air public seating. When the area is big enough, or the seating is clumped around particular businesses you either get a dedicated cleaner or places each take a section (probably the second would be the solution to this little malls problem, although since people can sit anywhere I think it would still be a problem. I'm not sure of the solution. When I used to be down that way a lot (open mic at the bar across the way) I usually just grabbed a sub and went across the street to the bar to eat. Since the bar didn't serve food (oldest bar in Albany... long thin place, no spot for a kitchen) they didn't care if customers brought in food. Sometimes the bartenders would even give you cash to go grab them something.

I worry about the pandemic increasing drive-thru use and motivating businesses to build more of them. Because I have close family members and friends with serious health conditions, I’ve found myself using them more even though I hate them. There’s only one pharmacy and one food place near me with walk-up pick up windows. I can’t even always use that pharmacy because I have some meds that get really pricey unless I go to a further away pharmacy that has some discount deal with my insurance

“The car is most peoples third place” is the most dystopian yet true sentence I’ve heard so far.

Drive-through banking is still a thing because so many banks disabled the feature that allows their ATMs to take deposits of cash or checks.

There's a common misconception out there that centralization of food production always leads to increased food safety, but in reality, it's an optimization problem. Places like Applebees send thier meat to plants to have grill lines put onto them. The grill line plant also services other restaurants. If something went wrong there, a lot of people would be affected. The reason these plants look like fricking cleanrooms is because they have to be cleanrooms - the business model has made it that way. On the flip side, if something went wrong at a local independant restaurant, less people would be affected, though they might be affected more often in aggregate. That being said, if you get poisoned at a local restaurant, at least you can go to a different restaurant. If you get poisoned at applebees, you can't just pick a different applebees and expect things to be different if the food poisoning came from something upstream of the restaurant itself. If your goal is food safety, remember that the level of centralization found in massive restaurant chains today is a result of optimizing for profit - not safety. If we were optimizing for food safety, the level of centralization would be somewhere between a local restaurant and a modern fast food chain. Probably something like regional food production facilities that each service a metro area instead of a few plants spread across the country. There would be multiple, separate chains of custody, but those chains would be shorter.

That new development though.... damn, that's some drive-thru on drive-thru violence right there.

We are all pedestrians when out of the vehicle, but there are preferred classes of pedestrians, prioritizing those who arrive by car & walk through the parking lot (private pedestrian) way over those that walk from the common space (public pedestrian).

One time I went to Chick-Fil-A by bike and they closed the indoors because they were short-staffed. They refused to let me even buy a meal!!! A good samaritan bought a meal for me and I offered to give him money but he didn't let me (because I'm young and he's a middle-aged adult). That really infuriated me.

I absolutely hate drive-thrus. Of course, I hate driving in general, so it's a logical extension. Nothing like getting trapped between two groups of vehicles in a one-way mini-street to order your food, using an error-prone method that forces employees to rush and uses 10 times as much land.

Australia has drive-through off license...get your priorities right!🍺

Another thing we should be considering is how little most of these fast food employees get paid. Fast food restaurants will pay their employees $10-$15/hr and expect them to set aside $700/month or whatever ridiculous cost so they can drive to work there, in addition to all of their other expenses. They create transportation poverty by paying their employees so little and then they go further to perpetuate auto dependency by neglecting walk in customers or outright refusing to serve them if they're not in a car.

It also sucks that when your trying to find food after drinking a lot of places only have the drive thru open and refuse to serve you if you walk up to the drivethru window because they prefer you drive under the influence.

I do remember that one night during a road trip through the southwest I had to get some cash at night, and the only ATM in that town was a drive-trough, which is really awkward if you get there on foot (as i do as a European)

The downhill coast idea is novel but most vehicles need to be running in order to have power assistance with the brake system so.... probably not a good idea. Maybe a conveyer system like they use in some carwashes...?

The term food desert most often refers to lack of access for residents to fresh food and groceries. I think these neighborhoods often have few if any drive thru restaurants. I live about a mile north of downtown St. Louis and one Family Dollar and 3 gas stations are the only places where I can get any kind of groceries within a mile, and there are no drive thru places to get food.

Most vehicles in the last 10 years have had automatic stop-start systems, which limits the effects of idling. I don´t think it changes most of your criticisms though. I only bring it up because it also means right-on-red rules don´t make sense anymore.