Chick-fil-A’s drive-thru lane heightens the odds of traffic collisions and pedestrians getting injured. At peak-volume, the drive-through blocks one lane of traffic for as much as 90 minutes on weekdays and for as much as 155 minutes on Saturdays, according to a city traffic report.
“The city’s traffic engineer, police chief and community development director have evaluated the situation and believe that the persistent traffic back-up onto State Street is a public nuisance and that the nuisance is caused by the operation of a drive-through at the Chick-fil-A restaurant,” the document stated.
Kristen Sneddon, a member of Santa Barbara’s city council, believes the restaurant may have outgrown the location and that the problem can’t be fixed, according to the Santa Barbara News-Press. “Chick-fil-A has a good problem here. They are so successful, they have outgrown their site. It’s possible they were oversized for that site, to begin with,” Sneddon told a council meeting earlier this month, the newspaper reported.
At the city council session, Sneddon and other members unanimously approved moving toward a potential public nuisance designation. Chick-fil-A representatives asked the council to delay the nuisance designation and give it additional time to work on the fixing the problem. The council agreed to continued a public hearing until June 7.
Travis Collins, the franchised operator of the restaurant, said in a statement emailed to CBS MoneyWatch by Chick-fil-A that he wants to “be a good neighbor,” and was continuing efforts to ease the traffic issues. That’s including hiring additional staff and third-party traffic control, he said.
Drive-thru businesses are unusual in Santa Barbara as the city has prohibited their construction for more than four decades. But Chick-fil-A is grandfathered into its location, as it was previously a Burger King drive-thru with nothing like the current traffic.
