The California Cities Beefing With Fast Food Drive-Thrus

The burgers are so good that they’re causing traffic jams. At least that’s what’s happening in Culver City, where the line of cars at spots like In-N-Out Burger spills beyond the parking lot and into the street. Now officials there are trying to ban new drive-thrus outright. These bans are not an entirely new phenomenon — San Luis Obispo banned drive-thrus back in 1982 — but they’re getting newfound attention as recent pushes gain national attention. We’ll look at California’s role in the rise of fast food drive-thrus and examine whether the current moment could be the beginning of the end for a fast food staple.

Guests:

• Shawn Hubler, Los Angeles bureau chief, The New York Times
• Adam Chandler, food columnist, The Wall Street Journal; author of “Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom”

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum, I’m Mina Kim. The burgers and fries are that good that they’re causing traffic jams? At least that’s what’s happening in Culver City, where the line of cars at spots like In-N-Out spills beyond the parking lot and into the street. Now officials there are trying to ban new drive-throughs outright.

These bans are not an entirely new phenomenon. San Luis Obispo banned drive-throughs back in 1982, but they’re getting a spotlight as recent pushes gain national attention. For a closer look at the city’s beef with restaurant drive-throughs, we’re joined first by New York Times Los Angeles Bureau Chief Shawn Hubler, whose piece is “In California, Some Cities Are Done With Drive-Throughs.” Welcome to Forum, Shawn.

Shawn Hubler: Yeah, hello. Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Mina Kim: Well, thanks for being on with us. So you report that when In-N-Out proposed another location in Culver City, it touched off a rebellion. The City Council was inundated. What happened?

Shawn Hubler: So Culver City is a community on the west side of L.A. It’s been long attractive to families. There’s a long studio presence there. Wizard of Oz was famously made there. The Munchkins stayed there while Wizard of Oz was filming long ago.

But in the last couple of decades, it’s been regarded generally as one of the few places in L.A. that was pretty affordable. It was a place where you were just inland from the beach cities and close enough, if you worked in show business, to studios if you needed to drive there, but you could also afford a home and raise a family there.

In recent years, though, like a lot of Los Angeles, it’s become increasingly congested, increasingly in demand. Home prices have risen sky-high, and Culver City is a pretty congested place, just generally speaking.

And so the neighborhood, the community, has been over time really kind of bearing down on the idea of making it a more walkable, more livable, transit-friendly community and one that kind of — not exactly rejected car culture, but was interested in becoming more of its own sort of village feature, emphasizing that aspect.

There are a lot of drive-throughs around Culver City, and even in Culver City already. In-N-Out, in fact, has several drive-throughs within just a couple of minutes of the location that they had proposed.

But what had happened was they had come in and they had — just as transit-friendly, bicycle-friendly, walkability initiatives — they came in and proposed a drive-through, a big drive-through with lots of parking spaces, at an intersection that had three major thoroughfares, but also schools and parks and a few other drive-throughs in the neighborhood.

They just freaked out. They were just, “Sorry, this is enough is enough. We don’t want this.” They revolted. And even though In-N-Out is actually among drive-throughs quite a popular one in California — as you know, everybody loves In-N-Out. It is kind of a tourist attraction in L.A. People get off the plane at LAX and the first place they go is In-N-Out often — even so, they said, “We just don’t want it here.”

And the City Council, which had been prepared to really sort of let it happen, gave it a second thought. And when that happened, it just really touched a nerve.

Mina Kim: Wow. You have some pretty incredible visuals of how long these lines can get near In-N-Out, meandering for stretches of city blocks. So when you say that the City Council decided that they would, in fact, do something about the neighborhood’s concerns about having a drive-through, what did they do?

Shawn Hubler: So the City Council then started to — they took a hard look at this, and the first thing that they did was they said, “Well, let’s hit pause here,” right?

They heard from everybody. In-N-Out — there’s a whole procedure, as most cities have. If a company like In-N-Out wants to open, and In-N-Out came and held community meetings. The City Council and the Planning Department looked at it and said, you know, maybe the neighbors have a point here.

And the neighborhood, by the way, was very well organized. The community members got together and they brought data and more data and more data to the city, saying, “Here’s how much pollution it’s going to generate, and here’s how much litter it’s going to generate, and there’s a school not far from here, and here is how many people sort of use these intersections,” and so on.

The city examined that. First, they said, “Let’s hit pause.” There was a limit, I think, on how long they could pause the progression of this request from In-N-Out before it became official and other sorts of regulations kicked in. They hit pause on it, and then there were neighborhood further — and then in June, they extended this sort of shorter moratorium that they had initiated, while the city then draws up a plan to permanently ban new drive-throughs.

Old ones won’t be affected, but new drive-throughs. And sort of decide how tough they want to be with that, whether they want to allow any exceptions, and so on. They really want to examine the issue.

Mina Kim: So drive-throughs that exist are not going away. The question is, will the city allow them in the future? And right now they’re working to make a ban on those permanent.

Let me invite listeners in. Do you prefer to use the drive-through at fast food and other restaurants, or would you be fine without them? What do you make of attempts to ban drive-throughs? And just curious if drive-throughs have played a role in your life. Are there any drive-through moments or stories that happened to you? Do you use them for convenience, nostalgia, something else?

866-733-6786. Again, 866-733-6786. The number to call. The email address is [email protected], and you can post on Discord, BlueSky, Facebook or Instagram at KQED Forum.

Well, interestingly, this effort by Culver City made national news, and you report that they sort of got pummeled with right-wing blowback. What were some of these right-wing news sites saying? And, you know, who were they?

Shawn Hubler: Sure. Well, one of the things that was kind of interesting about it was that, you know, sort of suddenly the issue of drive-throughs became a kind of a valued talking point among right-wing media. They were among the first to sort of play this issue up.

The New York Post said that Culver City was engaged in a war on fast food. Newsmax had a conversation — commentators on Newsmax said that it was anti-family. And there was a whole sort of — the framing of it was that uppity, uptight, you know, nanny-state people in West Los Angeles were trying to drive real Americans away from their drive-throughs and away from the source of food that real Americans in real cars wanted to eat, preferably in those real cars.

So it became a conversation between working — a class-based conversation, in other words, between working-class folks and environmentalists and city planners and so on.

Interestingly, by the way, in fairness, I should add, in Culver City proper, there was very little of that debate. There was not a lot of complaints within the city. We want yet another In-N-Out because the In-N-Outs that are available in the city — there’s one just literally across the street from the city line in Palms, the neighborhood of Palms in Los Angeles, and then there’s another one that’s just barely inside the line where it abuts the city of Marina del Rey, or the community of Marina del Rey.

And both of these In-N-Outs are — they’re not just amazing. They’re quite amazing. They’re notorious in the community for these serpentine lines that just kind of flow and eddy and create these amazing pileups. They’re really quite something.

And so in the community, there wasn’t as much a debate. But the debate did burgeon far, far beyond the community nationally and became a question, a class—

Mina Kim: Well, you know, they’re not the only city banning or looking to ban drive-throughs, right? In California, where else are we seeing these efforts?

Shawn Hubler: Oh, it’s interesting. It correlates quite a bit with affluence, interestingly. In the past, that hasn’t been the case. There have been other periods where there have been sort of movements toward banning drive-throughs.

And many cities, by the way, just don’t even need to bother banning them because their conditional-use permits for these kinds of businesses are so difficult to get that drive-throughs just look elsewhere.

For example, Santa Monica has banned drive-throughs for a very long time. West Hollywood doesn’t allow them. In Beverly Hills, it’s very, very difficult to get a drive-through approved there. And I talked to someone in Beverly Hills. She told me that in the city government there, she said she couldn’t remember the last time a drive-through was approved in Beverly Hills.

In wine country, now the city of Napa is reviewing its zoning code. Napa’s Planning Commission recently launched a plan for a drive-through ban. They would ban, I think they were talking, the last time I checked anyway, they were talking about even banning dry cleaners and car washes that were drive-through, which was, you know, in addition to fast-food places.

Santa Barbara County — there was a Chick-fil-A that was debated for an area that already allowed a drive-through, I think. It was at the site of an IHOP, I guess it was shuttered. They barely got that drive-through approved recently.

The city of Santa Barbara has been arguing for years about a drive-through on State Street, a Chick-fil-A on State Street, that’s been an issue.

Palm Springs is still — they’ve been debating for two years over a drive-through there. There have been concerns about traffic there, and the debate there is also architectural. There’s an issue around whether the drive-through is mid-century, is mid-century modern.

Mina Kim: I see. Wow. So is it becoming a little bit of a movement? And we just have five seconds, but does it feel like that?

Shawn Hubler: Maybe, maybe. I think so. I do think that the pros and cons have become a big deal.

Mina Kim: Well, we’ll dig into them more after the break. This is Forum. We’re talking drive-throughs. Stay with us.