Major City Sacrificing Drive-Thrus for the Environment
America is all about its cars and convenience, and the two things come together in drive-thrus. However, long lines of cars idling to wait for food is not great for the environment. To help make the air in its city cleaner, the Minneapolis City Council recently voted to ban all new drive-thrus.
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To be clear, the city has no plans to halt the drive-thrus already in operation, but it will deny any plans to build new establishments featuring them. AutoBlog reports that this doesn’t just apply to food or beverage-focused drive-thrus, but on all of them. It’s all part of the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan to hopefully combat the effects of climate change in the area, create a cleaner environment to live in, and otherwise improve neighborhoods.
The Star Tribune reports that kicking drive-thrus to the curb was first proposed by City Council President Lisa Bender in 2018, but her reasons weren’t purely environmental. She hoped that cutting down the car queues would reduce noise, increase pedestrian safety on crosswalks and in parking lots, and trim the number of cars idling in an area. This also isn’t the first move against drive-thrus Minneapolis has made, as they were already disallowed in 17 of the city’s 23 zoning districts.
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To be honest, cutting out drive-thrus can make running errands more inconvenient, but neighbors to upcoming new businesses will probably appreciate losing the traffic and noise of all those running cars. Our staff is pretty able-bodied, though, so we wonder if this will throw a wrench into the lives of Minneapolis’s disabled shoppers There was no word as to how this could affect new retail stores, like Minneapolis-based Target, that utilize order pickup.
Will Minneapolis crumble into ash because it cut out drive-thrus? Probably not. All of the inconvenience will be worth it for cleaner and quieter neighborhoods.
News Source: AutoBlog and Star Tribune
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