Drive-Thrus: Stop The Knee-Jerk Reactions: READER
One of the foundations of The Bulldog Commenting All-Stars is sisco farraro. Here he takes on Timbitgate:
A couple of quotes in the in the previous drive-thru article are amusing.
First, “the list of cities prioritizing traffic safety and air quality over driver convenience is relatively small”.
Think about the concept of removing drive-thru lanes to increase traffic safety. More cars backing in and out of parking spaces is safer than a line of traffic moving slowly forward in a straight line? Not a chance.
Cities Take Aim At The Drive-Thru Restaurant
Further on in the article the following appears: “they require huge amounts of asphalt, which exacerbates the urban heat island effect common to many paved-over areas”. The urban heat island effect? What?
The amount of space required to park cars so people can stop (probably leave their engines running for a longer period than it takes to proceed through a drive-thru due to increased wait times), enter a restaurant to place an order, return to their cars, then risk an accident backing out of a parking spot is going to take up a lot more space than a single lane for slowly-moving cars, vans, trucks and SUVs.
Too many issues these days are dealt with through knee-jerk reactions rather than with foresight and proper impact analysis.
This is the way Ottawa’s city planners, project managers and the like behave and is a large part of why Ottawa has ended up in the mess in which it currently finds itself.
—
Don’t miss our regular features
Everything Ottawa Full Local Bulldog Canadian
Opinion Comments Breaking News
Ontario World Get Cheap Gas Big Money
Pop Gossip Your Home Relax …
Bulldog Weather Full Local Sports
Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
From what I remember, Earl McRae, a local newspaper reporter, wrote an article supporting the closure of drive-thrus due to their negative impact on the environment. He suggested that cars idling in line were causing an environmental disaster and that people only got exercise by turning off their engines and going inside the cafe instead of remaining in their cars. Earl is still relevant today. RIP
Think for a moment about the effect of City traffic light timing in addition to tie ups due to road closures for “active” use on stationary vehicles generating greenhouse gas. Waiting a traffic light or two in a drive through line from time to time seems pretty insignificant to me.
Thank you for a good counterpoint analysis of a complex problem, sisco. Too few people, and especially self interest groups, bother even trying to understand the weaknesses to the solutions they have proposed. They just want their solution, even if it does not actually work in real life.
A few too many decades ago I studied matrix math in business school. Matrices, when you boil them all down, are just algorithms. The general objective was (and remains) to optimize the bottom right hand corner of the grid. Optimizing implies that not every cell will have the best solution. Nor will every row or column. Solving a matrix requires understanding the impact of each element of the grid on the other elements. It requires accepting that trade offs are an essential part of the solution.
I seldom (once maybe twice a year) use a drive through. My choice based on my priorities. If you want to use one, have at it. Not my decision. However, as I alluded to in a comment to the column that spawned this discussion, if your choice means that you are lined up in an active traffic lane on an arterial road to get your double double then you are creating an immediate hazard to others. Move along. There will another drive through down the road.
I guess you’ve never been stuck at the intersection of Carling and Broadview at morning rush hour, when sometimes two lanes of traffic are tied up by people looking to buy mediocre coffee from a place named after a mediocre player from a team that defies mediocrity.
Thinking of vehicles in line, our hazardous waste collections came to mind after I wrote the above comment. Too often I’ve driven a half hour each way to the waste collection site and waited in line as much as a half hour. Maybe our environmentalists can think of a solution to the hazardous waste drive through.