What the heck are you talking about?
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea!?
I Kind of think the double lanes are stupid, and more because people can’t decide whether there is one line, or two to get into the things in the first place. But there are two circumstances where they are clearly faster than a single line:
- When the drive through is not busy, and one of the people wants to wait to order/has to look at the menu/get orders from their 50,000 passengers
- When an order would require cooking more food, ie, an order of 25 fries or 10 20-piece mcnuggets or something - in that case getting the order in the front end faster means you can spot the need to cook more food earlier which could mean less waiting.
It’s becoming a big issue with Tim Hortons here in Soviet Canuckistan. They do build the drive-thrus to not spill into the street, but the demand is much higher than anticipated! They’ve started retrofitting many into 2 lane drive-thrus to help solve the problem. I’ve also seen them build another Timmy’s across a busy street (and a couple blocks down) from an existing one to reduce accidents with left hand turns.
People love drive-thrus around here. Occasionally the municipality requires some improvements to prevent traffic problems. But I’ve never seen any tie ups around them. Now this is suburban and there’s plenty of space. I don’t recall seeing any drive throughs in a downtown city area.
I love the drive-through liquor store!
The Checkers double-sided drive-through can be amusing when people go through the wrong side and have to reach across their car to get to the window (see it a lot late night, i.e. drunk people).
The city I grew up in (pop. 250,000) has zoned to exclude drive-thrus. Believe me, those people are getting their food and getting it fast enough.
There is near where I live now a Starbucks with a drive-thru. It will be easier to explain, I think, with some street names. It is on the corner of Main Street and Central Avenue. Main St. is a fairly busy north/south road, with 2 lanes in each direction. On the west side of Main, Central Ave is divided.
The entrance that the people who designed the building want people to use, as indicated by several prominently placed signs, for the drive-thru is on Main.
People traveling east on Central should turn left at the light and enter from the Main St side. They don’t. Well some do, but an alarming number make a U-turn and enter from Central. I think it’s to jump the light. At the same time, folks traveling east on Central head straight through the light and enter the exit only driveway rather than turning right onto Main, and then turning left into Starbucks.
All the while, people who have successfully completed their drive-thru purchases, and those who have used the very poorly engineered parking lot, are trying to exit and can’t.
I don’t think this is a reason to hate all drive-thrus, but this particular one is a nightmare. It really does mess up traffic something fierce. But I live in an unincorporated municipality with a resident pop. under 60,000, and I suspect, no zoning ordinance.
I’ve always thought that the simplest solution is to enforce laws against obstructing traffic. If the drive through line has filled the parking lot, you don’t get to block the public thoroughfare while waiting your turn to get into the parking lot. The parking lot is full. Come back later.
If I’m waiting for street parking, I can’t just stop until someone moves.
This is northern New Jersey and any type of driving there is pure hell.
Addison, TX, a small suburb of Dallas has no drive-thrus at all. I don’t know if there’s a McDonald’s, but what fast food restaurants there are are all walk-ins. It also has a very large selection of frou-frou eateries. It works for them, I suppose, but it helps that they’re completely surrounded by Dallas and other suburbs that have plenty of drive-thrus.
The problem is getting it enforced. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the police enforce it on a Tim Horton’s, probably because they don’t want to fuck with the people who give them their coffee and donuts! 
It seems that folks who don’t see a traffic problem associated with drive-thrus are picturing these business standing within a much larger parking lot or plaza. However in many smaller, old New England towns, a lot that’s zoned for business use can often be barely large enough for the building and ample parking for patrons who eat or shop inside. And these lots are accessed directly from the road. So adding drive-thru windows to existing businesses or building new businesses which include drive-thrus can certainly result in added traffic congestion either because of a backed up line at the drive-thru or just because of the added, almost constant in and out traffic from the lot.
On a busy road, having a car pull out of a donut shop every few of minutes is not a big deal, but having one pull out every thirty seconds or so can pose a problem, especially if the donut shop is near an intersection or between sets of traffic light.
Not every community has enough room to stick all their drive-thru businesses in the middle of huge parking lots or commercial plazas.
Me too! Though it’ll always be Rally’s to me. :: glares at Checkers sign ::