Drive-throughs are designed to make doing things — picking up food, ordering coffee and depositing checks — as convenient as possible. Americans' desire to do as much as possible without even getting out of their automobiles, combined with the ease of drive-throughs, contributes to the proliferation of "car culture," which some cities are beginning to try to change.
Minneapolis is one of them, according to The Washington Post. New proposed regulations in the city aim to "clamp down on drive-throughs in favor of people traveling the city on foot," the Star Tribune reported. New rules would restrict where drive-throughs could be constructed in the city.
"The streets where a lot of people are walking, on our transit corridors, maybe we don't want to have drive-throughs at all," Council Member Lisa Bender, who sponsored the proposal with Council Member Lisa Goodman, told the Star Tribune. "If we do, we may want to strengthen our controls of them and minimize their impact on people walking."
While some kinds of drive-throughs are beneficial to communities, such as pharmacy drive-throughs that make picking up medications easier for the sick and elderly, the push to reduce the prevalence of drive-throughs is to make roadways more compatible for walking. Additionally, tighter restriction around drive-throughs will reduce the number of cars that idle, which contributes significantly to air pollution.