Minneapolis-area lovers of quick and easy coffee, prescriptions, check-cashing, dry cleaning, and Big Macs are up in arms this week, after two city council members floated a proposal to tighten restrictions on urban drive-throughs. Drive-throughs are already banned from a number of the city’s downtown areas, as well as regions included in its “Pedestrian Oriented Overlay Districts.” By expanding those districts, the proposed ordinance would nix the construction of additional vehicle-friendly pathways in an expanded portion of the city, a “concession” to pedestrians and cyclists in an increasingly pedestrian- and cyclist-loving metropolis.
“The streets where a lot of people are walking, on our transit corridors, maybe we don’t want to have drive-throughs at all,” the council member Lisa Bender explained to the Minneapolis Star Tribune Saturday. “If we do, we may want to strengthen our controls of them and minimize their impact on people walking.”
The steel-tongued retribution was quick and fierce. The Star Tribune’s own editorial board aimed its pen Monday squarely at the offending council members, writing that drive-throughs are “an extra measure of comfort for customers”—parents with sick children, the tired and hungry who want food without leaving their cars, etc.
”A danger to pedestrians?” the editorial board wrote. “No more than any other obstacle pedestrians face in a busy city. ...If you want to walk dreamlike, headphones in, Zen in place, find a park path.”
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