American Block Redevelopment | 3 fl | U/C

[ijmorlan]

The Tim's at Weber and Bridgeport does not have a drive through either.
In my opinion, drive throughs embody much of that which is wrong with certain aspects of North American society.

Completely Agree with this statement. If I were in charge in the region I would implement a regional tax on all drive-thru purchases. Not only are drive-thrus bad for the environment. They provide an unhealthy and car centric built environment. They Also give an unfair advantage to Multi-national food corporations. I think by adding a 5-10% tax on them would be a great alternative to banning them all together. This would dissuade them from new ones being built. It punishes people that Idle for 5 mins for a coffee. It would also raise some important money that could be used towards housing, and transit.

A better idea would be a carbon tax (to capture the externalities associated with burning fossil fuels), a congestion charge (to capture the externalities associated with driving on the roads at busy times), a mileage fee (to capture the costs associated with actually using the roads in wear and tear), and possibly other similar fees that don’t get into the details of what the person is doing with the car or how the property owner is using their property within their boundary.

Just banning drive-thrus would just inconvenience car drivers without actually making much difference to how much driving happens. The above measures by contrast would actually cause the costs associated with driving to be paid by drivers rather than by the population (of the world, in the case of the carbon tax) at large. This in turn would reduce the use of and therefore economic viability of drive-thrus.

I might be able to be convinced that in dense urban areas drive-thrus should be banned as a zoning matter, but even there I doubt that a drive-thru would be viable anywhere that it would be banned under zoning. For the same reason, there is no need for a rule banning single-story buildings at Yonge and King in Toronto.

This is a similar consideration to campaigns against idling. I totally ignore those campaigns. If it is convenient to me to idle for a few minutes (usually due to heating or air conditioning), I do so. Since I usually walk or bike to work and even on those occasions when I drive (usually due to an errand immediately before or after work) the distance is 2.2km, almost anybody who regularly drives to work but never idles is still causing way more emissions than I do. It makes no difference whether the carbon is emitted while idling or while driving; I choose to spend my emissions budget partly on idling when it is convenient. If somebody else spends it in a drive-thru line I don’t really think that’s my concern.