Fast Food Drive Throughs

A little story in yesterday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about drive-throughs at fast food restaurants caught my eye. In Baldwin Park, CA, where the drive through was first conceived in 1948, the city has decided to ban any more of them.

Now, I fully admit that I’m a bit weird but I personally never use a drive through to obtain food. Of course, I don’t consider fast food food either. I will stop for frozen custard now and then, but I always park my car and go inside for it. I say this because the one thing that I find most objectionable about drive-throughs is not even mentioned in the story: all those cars waiting for food are running their engines and therefore using more oil and contributing more to air pollution problems.

(Full disclosure: I do occasionally pull my car up to an ATM. But only if there’s no other car ahead of me. If there is, I park and go in the bank. I sometimes come back out before the car at the ATM has left.)

I read the story about Baldwin Park in the Journal Sentinel, but their website refused to divulge it. I did find it, however, posted on the Seattle Times website. You can read it there:
City where drive-through eating began is full