this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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The real boring dystopia is the radical car-centrism of having a drive-thru at all to begin with.
Try having small children; drive through a can be a lifesaver because you don’t need to unbuckle them, get their winter clothes on, get them into the restaurant, wait in line, order the food to go, then wait for the food, and then reverse the steps to get back into the car. It’s a giant PITA to just get some French fries, chicken tenders, and carrot sticks, let alone the drastically increased exposure to germs associated with a crowded restaurant. You may have heard, there’s a pretty bad wave of Covid, influenza, and RSV right now. Not sharing air with other people is a big part of staying healthy right now.
You're assuming to get to a location you need a car, that's still car-centric design. If your primary argument for drive-throughs relies on the fact that you needed a car to reach the location in the first place then you're missing the problem.
The person's point stands if they were on a bicycle. You can't just leave a child in a bike carrier at the bike rack.
Not after that chewing-out by the police department, I can't.
Can you imagine doing such scary thing as WALKING?
Like a peasant?
New american aristoracy I guess?
I mean their only point is really if the kids didn't have their "winter clothes on", which would be pretty unlikely on a bike, and I would think in a car, for the most part. I guess it depends where you're going, but that still seems like it would be a good idea, just before you leave the house, generally. I don't think walking into a restaurant, for maybe the minute from the parking space to the door, is going to be a more substantial amount of time, that you would have to have your "winter clothes" on for, compared to if you were entering any other building. I dunno, the tradeoff might be easier in terms of like, without winter clothes, it's easier to get your kids to go potty or change them, but that's kind of a moot point anyways, because most honda odysseys don't have toilets in them, and restaurants do.
Waiting in lines is going to be a problem regardless of whether or not you're in a car. It might be easier in a car, since you have more direct control of your children, but if you're walking, a stroller would be the best analogue for that, and you should probably have that anyways, if you're taking your toddlers for a walk.
It's also not as though walkable restaurants can't necessarily have outdoor ordering windows, hole-in-the-wall style, maybe helping to prevent the flu or what have you. If that's a major concern, though, I think a mask would be a bigger help. Maybe not for kids, they're kinda too gross for that. You could probably leave a kid inside of your little kid bike trailer, or kid's seat on the back or whatever, while you walk up to the hole in the wall and order your food, since they're in view the whole time, and that wouldn't be very inconvenient. I would think the only problem would be if you were going inside. There are some cool options for bike trailer strollers, if you wanted to just detach your kids from your bike, and then just like, go straight inside, but that's kind of a hassle, I haven't seen a good one since they all have to be overbuilt bike trailers first, and strollers second. Someone might make a good amount of schmoney if they could really nail that concept.
In any case, all their points are moot and bad and cars are bad and dumb.
Putting a child in and out of a bike carrier is a ton easier compared to a car seat. It's not really an issue.
Shhhh we’re hating on cars now, it doesn’t matter that they’re a massive utility the improves the day to day life of millions upon millions of people. Also, we don’t do kids here. Something something capitalism.
Bring on the people movers and the monorails; I’m here for it, but I don’t want to get Covid again and as much as I despair of humanity, I have kids and so do millions of others so we should be working together to make a better world for current and future generations.
Maybe but if I had a choice between the two drive thrus would be out of here
I respect your perspective but as a parent, trust me, life is really freaking hard as it is. Making it harder is unconscionable.
Not trying to downplay the right to your opinion but I feel like there has to be a better way to allow parents to enjoy options while also not making restaurants hostile to pedestrians
I absolutely agree with making more places pedestrian friendly, I just think a drive through makes too much sense to dismiss out of hand. Heck, I’m in favor of walk-up windows to better serve those of us who don’t want to go inside a restaurant even without kids.
I just don't see how a pedestrian friendly place of business and a drive through can co-exist. Open to being proven wrong but as I see it, anywhere that incorporates a drive thru adds at least 3 areas where traffic intersects with customers in a dangerous manner: at the beginning, around the store and the unavoidable blind spot when leaving.
Not trying to take away from your ability to enjoy these things I just don't think they are a good solution to a public place, as with anything car centric.
I don’t have images readily available, but there are little shopping centers surrounding parking lots where pedestrians go right from the sidewalks into the various restaurants/shops, if you can imagine a U shape for the shops and the parking lot and vehicular entrances inside the U. It just takes some planning and extra space, and you know, capitalism isn’t a huge fan of “wasted” space that isn’t generating revenue.
You may have noticed already that I disagree with your reasoning for using a drive-thru, but you are not wrong that they make life easier, and I'm not even saying that you shouldn't use them. I'm just saying that kids can handle a brief bit of cold.
As a person who became disabled a few years back, I wish many, many more places would have drive through or order and pick-up without having to get out of your car. It's a valuable service. I just think it's over utilized by people who don't need it, which is bad for the environment and not great for how little exercise people already get (walking from the back of the parking lot is not the end of the world, people).
The pandemic was kind of a lifesaver for a lot of us. Suddenly delivery options and order for pickup options have become available where we used to have to struggle to go into these places. It's great. It's not great for the environment or for most people's health, but it's great for those who really need it.
Sonic works well without the drive through needed.
They don't need to be super bundled up just going from the car to the restaurant and back.
Tell me you live somewhere temperate without telling me where you live. Have you been to much of the US in the winter?
I agree with you and I live in Florida. I'd rather deal with the drive thru for the same reasons you listed.
Also, I won't have to deal with trying to buckle a 2 & 4 year-old out of and back into their car seats, especially when it's raining and 95*F. The 4 year old has ASD and refuses to be helped into the car so they throw a tantrum in the rain, and the 2 year old loses their mind just because.
There are things that people who don't have/want kids can't understand, and it's an argument not worth having.
Understanding those things is why I don't want kids.
I spent 5 years living in Alaska.
You’ve lived in Alaska for multiple winters and you aren’t worried about the problem with exposing small children to extreme cold?
You should see how the Finnish treat their babies. Things like frostbite and frostnip don't happen in the few seconds it takes to get from a car to a door. Yes, with small children, those 10 or 20 seconds might turn into 60, but they will be fine.
A low temperature in Alaska will affect you MUCH differently than low temperatures in say, BC which is much more humid and cuts into my bones at -1 where in Alaska/Yukon I've handled -34 and I'm mostly struggling to breath.
As long as it's a quick jaunt into a heated facility, it should be fine with some moderate layers.
These days I live in Washington, not quite as cold as BC but mostly similar. Previously, I have lived in the Northeast of the US and the Northeast of Japan, which are both humid and quite cold and windy in the winter.
I know winter.
That's pretty cool :p
Not in US, but it's -18 outside right now, and I had no problem walking to my grandma's home in -25 for 1km. This is not even Yakutia, but US is definetly not Oymyakon.
Temperature is in °C for you imperialists here
I’m happy for you? You’re very tough. I wouldn’t do that shit if you paid me ten million and I definitely wouldn’t make a ten year old do it.
People do it for living. Just wear warm clothes. Well, that warm clothes might be an overkill, just wear regular warm clothes. As I said it's not even Yakutia.
10 years olds, you know, need to go to school. And they do*. I did when I was 10. Everyone did.
*unless it's below -25 outside
Why do you need children to wait in line with you? Are you in Soviet Union during deficit where there was a limit how much one person can buy?
Give me another globe!
Because letting toddlers run free around restaurants is asshole behavior.
It was more military focus than car focus. While in uniform the military isn't/wasn't supposed to run errands essentially, so they couldn't get out of their cars. McDonald's introduced the drive thru so that soldiers could grab a bite to eat without exiting their vehicles. Not that that is any better, just the reason that the first ones were even a thing.
Everyone else installing the things is definitely car-centric.
Damn, that's the worst unintended consequence since employer-provided healthcare.
Employer provided healthcare happened under the Nixon administration, so this happened before that in the 50s
Employer provided healthcare started as a benefit during WWII because it was a loophole around wage controls.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/why-is-health-care-expensive-wwii-wage-controls/
I worded it badly. While it's true that is when the process started, Nixon changed healthcare so that it could be for profit, which it wasn't prior to that, thereby ensuring that healthcare and employment would permanently be tied together
I was going to a local place until they shut down out of nowhere that had basically the same thing as a drive thru, but for foot traffic (you could go inside, or you could go to the side of the building and order from a window at the sidewalk). I could imagine even in a fully walkable city that you can't drive in would have "walk thrus."
One of my favorite fast-food joints when I visited the states was Checkers. It was only walk-through and looked horrible to work in (Shed-sized building but one kitchen), but I liked the concept. It was easy to wander up, order food, chill, then maybe wander off somewhere else.
Without any cars to access or even reliably park (??), it was relaxing. A small slice of walker's paradise where all of the scenery catered to our eyes instead of condensed seating areas surrounded by idling cars.
Weird. Checkers is usually a tiny building which is entirely geared toward drive-through orders and is rather pedestrian unfriendly in colder weather because it is all outside ordering and dining if you don't want to use the drive-through.
Even weirder, because where I am every checkers is in a gas station, with a drive through on the side of the building. If that isn't as car-centric as it gets, just shoot me.
This is the part I don't get. I watched Chick-Fil-A build a new restaurant. Required all kinds of crazy drainage engineering to get into the corner of a larger parking lot. But throw in a covered drive-through on top of that? Absolutely not. They did build a kiosk for the drive-through, but could have just as easily built a second drive-through window and called it a day.
There's a small local burger chain by me which does this. They have a small hut for their restaurant, no inside seating. Drive-thru is on the right and walk-thru is on the left.