american car culture is just dumb: f-150’s and drive thrus… u don see this bs in france or japan
It’s insane, where I live, how literally dozens of drivers, more than half of them in huge trucks, will idle in a Chick-fil-A drive thru for 25 minutes just to avoid walking 20 feet. No wonder Americans are obese.
One of the things that legit blew my mind moving from Northern California to Texas is how many freaking drive thrus there are here. It’s wild. They are just attached to everything. I guess it’s a byproduct of land being at less of a premium.
I think it’s cultural, too. You might also notice that people drive up and down the parking lot at Walmart looking for a space just ten feet closer to the entrance. Getting out of the car and walking somewhere is anathema in places like Tx.
Yup. Although to be fair, the urban/suburban sprawl here is pretty wild. I’m in DFW suburbs and there is nothing walkable around me. Closest grocery store is a 6mile round trip with missing sidewalks and I’d probably consider anything within like 20-25 mins by car to be “close.” When you have to rely on your car so heavily, it’s no wonder that it doesn’t even occur to people there’s any other way.
Last time I went for fast food, I was at the counter while the guy took 3 drive through orders before taking mine.
I’ve had the same experience.
Unfortunately this is an absolute necessity if you’re offering drive through. The whole setup only works if you keep the line moving as fast as possible. This further incentivises people to not go in and use the drive through. A vicious cycle is born. If the folks in cars need to wait you’re essentially just doing a very inefficient version of curbside pickup.
The whole problem starts with putting a single oversized location somewhere out in bumfuck nowhere where everyone needs to drive to instead of multiple smaller locations in places where people already are because they live or work there.
The lifecycle of cars negatively impacts our environment, like the lifecycle of fastfood products. Additionally, both negatively impact human health. I can’t really think of one positive thing to say about drive-thrus. They’re convenient I suppose? Does that convenience really outweigh the damage?
One of my first weird (culture shocky) experiences from USA (Tennessee) during my first trip there was with a drive thru.
I wanted to grab something to eat in the evening and there was a fast food place just across the street from my hotel so I decided to walk there. Once there I realized that the main part of the restaurant is closed and only drive thru was open. Then as I was there on foot they wouldn’t serve me so I ended up walking to a petrol station down the road to actually buy something to eat which was quite scary as there were no sidewalks and I had to cross 6 lanes to get to the station.
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Bicycles don’t even need drive throughs! The whole reason why cars “need” them is because they are huge and thus parking lots are huge and thus the walk from the car to the restaurant is inconvenient. Parking lots are roughly 16x as large per vehicles as a simple bicycle parking design. Which mean your average trip from the vehicle to the entrance is gonna four times as far than if the whole place was dedicated for bikes. with more advanced designs like two layer racks this ratio would grow even more.
On top of that, a place that’s catering to bicycle traffic would inherently be set up on a more human scale and aim to serve fewer people, thus the space needed for customer vehicles would be even smaller. So you’re likely be able to more or less park directly in front of the business anyway and just walk in, grab your takeout and hop back onto your bike at roughly the same effort as waiting in the drive through would be.
The real problem in this isn’t the lack of bike-throughs but the limited number or restaurants that a reasonable number of people could bike without risking their lives.
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