Drive-Throughs

Local first-ring suburb city council member Sean Hayford Oleary had an interesting Twitter thread yesterday about drive-throughs. He was challenging a claim that they generate 70–80% of a chain restaurant's revenue:

Especially in the case of fast food, drive-thrus are profitable but only because they create thousands of car trips per day of low economic value.

If an office worker takes one car trip per day to work and generates $2000 of economic activity in a day's work, society benefits.

But what if that person works from home and instead drives the same distance to go to a McDonald's drive-thru?

In the first case, society paid for that auto infrastructure but gained $2000 of economic activity. For the McDonald's trip, society paid the same for $5 of activity.

We all pay the costs of infrastructure for those trips, so I don't think we should actively promote the lowest-value trips.

What's more, neighboring properties also pay by suffering noise and air pollution — resulting in lower property values and worse quality of life.

And those are largely because of the drive-through itself. Idling fumes are bad. An amplified scratchy voice coming out of the speaker is disruptive. Site plans necessary for a queue of 10+ cars are lower-density and less pedestrian-friendly.

Drive-throughs are another example of a business externalizing its costs to make a profit. It's just not quite as obvious as it is when an oil company does it.