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We're ThruHas the American romance with the drive-through gone sour?

By Tom VanderbiltPosted Friday, Dec. 11, 2009, at 5:48 PM ET

The drive-through is where one American obsession—mobility—meets another: consumption. Lately, though, this societal combo platter has come under fire, as people question the drive-through's environmental impact, its place in the evolving landscape of obesity (a 1,420-calorie Hardee's Monster Thickburger without having to leave your seat!), and even who has the right to step up to its crackly intercom.

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There has always been something odd in the encounter between automobility and architecture; the driver momentarily breaks her sense of hermetic enclosure, while the fast-food employee briefly thrusts himself out of the window, the two meeting amid the sickly sweet commingling of ambient grease and tailpipe exhaust. The car driver doesn't fully shed her sense of vehicular privacy and has a seemingly easy means of egress (surveillance cameras notwithstanding), which might explain why drive-up windows have become a particular locus of pranks (employees have been subject to sophomoric raps and "fire-in-the-hole" beverage assaults), deviant social behavior (driving naked), and crime (although here the car driver, temporarily exposed, is as much at risk as the employee).

It's not clear who built the first drive-through restaurant (although In-N-Out trumpets that it used the first speaker system in 1948). But the drive-through's central place in mainstream culture is actually rather new: McDonald's didn't open its first drive-through window until 1975, in Sierra Vista, Ariz., home to a nearby Army base. (One bit of lore alleges the drive-through was created so soldiers could order food without being seen in their fatigues.) Now, however, drive-throughs account for some 65 percent of McDonald's U.S. sales—a stunning demonstration of the radical shift in traffic culture, and increase in driving, since the early 1970s. The window has become so crucial that McDonald's actually demolished an outpost that was slated for renovation in San Luis Obispo, Calif., after the city upheld its ban on drive-throughs. (A company spokesman said, "We can't build a million-dollar McDonald's and not have a drive thru. We just can't do it.")

The drive-through was the spiritual successor, of course, of the drive-in restaurant, which still haunts our imagination with its carhops on roller skates, rock music coming through tinny speakers, and root-beer-laden trays attached to the window. But that was car culture 1.0: We were still trying to achieve some marriage of driving convenience and the desire to interact in public. The drive-through, on the other hand, is an adjunct of the growing American commute. People are now too time-starved even to leave their cars, much less sit around and listen to Bill Hailey. (Commuter culture is taking hold around the globe, too: As a Burger King exec told the Wall Street Journal, speaking on the emergence of drive-throughs—ventanillas—in Latin America, "everybody becomes more of a drive-through, hurry-up-and-eat-on-the-run kind of culture.")

The drive-through is a place predicated not on sociability but on pure efficiency. One imperative is to human contact; as QSR magazine (for "quick service restaurant") notes, "wireless headset technology has been credited with increasing traffic by as much as fifty cars an hour at some McDonald's stores." Other time-savers include stochastic queuing models, multilane drive-throughs (a perception-management tool as much as anything else, as research shows visibly longer lines deter would-be drive-through customers), and technologies like "Clear Sound," which "processes all sounds present at the drive-thru lane and eliminates extraneous ambient noises such as idling engines, mufflers and nearby traffic." Speaker clarity, as it happens, is just one of a set of factors rigorously examined each year by QSR, along with "speed" (Wendy's was tops, 134 seconds per vehicle) and "accuracy" (Chick Fil-A order-fillas managed to get 96.4 percent of orders right). Popeye's, if you're keeping track, seemed to be near bottom across multiple categories.

Fried chicken is no longer the only thing available at drive-throughs, of course: In the past few decades, the drive-through model has undergone category creep. Drive-through flu shots are the latest innovation, joining such services as pharmacies (though you might want to check your order), banks (though the number of windows is said to be shrinking thanks to electronic banking), and, in Southern California, drive-through dairies. Some 23 states, including Arizona, still permit drive-through liquor stores; New Mexico, which once led the country in drunk-driving fatalities, banned them in 1998, though some dispute the correlation between the ban and the lower rate of DUI deaths that ensued. The country now boasts a drive-through department store, a drive-through strip club, and even a drive-through politician. China has even planned a drive-through museum, appropriately dedicated to the car—though it may simply be Dubai-style architectural vaporware.

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Tom Vanderbilt is author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, now available in paperback. He is contributing editor to Artforum, Print, and I.D.; contributing writer to Design Observer; and has written for many publications, including Wired, the Wilson Quarterly, the New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. He blogs at howwedrive.com and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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