The vote that needed a die
On the night of June 8, 2026, the Culver City Council had a problem that was not about hamburgers. California law lets a city freeze a land use on an emergency basis, but only with four votes out of five. Two of the five members had recused themselves from the item in front of them, a 45-day moratorium on new drive-throughs. The city attorney’s solution was to have the two recused members roll a die. The loser returned to the dais, the freeze passed with four ayes, and a month later the council extended it for ten months and fifteen days, to June 7, 2027.
The item that had emptied the dais was an In-N-Out. The chain had filed a preliminary application in March for the Studio Village Shopping Center at Sepulveda and Sawtelle: two lanes merging into a queue sized for 26 cars, 61 parking spaces, hours running past midnight. It would have been the first new drive-through approved in Culver City since 1997. The city has nine.
That scene is the state of the American drive-through fight in the fall of 2026. It is small, procedural and local, and far more hedged than the headlines suggest. Reporters covering a council vote in one city reach for a national count, and the count they reach for is wrong. Several cities on the standard list never banned anything. Two of the oldest bans are routinely left off. And the actions that are multiplying are not bans at all but pauses, buffers, stacking minimums and, increasingly, freezes on the drive-through’s cousins: the car wash and the gas station.
What follows is an attempt to get the map right, one ordinance at a time, with the code sections attached so that anyone can check it. It will be updated as councils vote.
Eight cities, forty-seven years
Read against the zoning codes themselves, the list of American cities that prohibit new drive-throughs everywhere within their limits comes to eight.
Santa Barbara did it first, in 1979, and the rule survives as Section 28.87.240 of its municipal code and Section 30.185.160 of the new zoning ordinance: “New or expanded drive-through facilities are prohibited.” San Luis Obispo followed with Ordinance 941 (1982 Series), effective January 7, 1983. Nearly every national story credits San Luis Obispo as the pioneer. It was second.
Then nothing for a quarter century. Petaluma’s ban dates to its 2008 General Plan, adopted to cut greenhouse-gas emissions; the city’s zoning use tables still mark “Drive-through retail” and “Drive-through service” as not allowed in any district. Sebastopol made a 2012 moratorium permanent by unanimous vote in January 2015. Minneapolis acted on August 8, 2019, unanimously, in the ordinance that made the issue national. Fair Haven, New Jersey, adopted Ordinance 2022-15 on October 11, 2022. Annapolis finished Ordinance O-6-24 on December 9, 2024. Beacon, New York, passed Local Law 4 of 2025 on May 5, 2025, 6 to 1, with the mayor in dissent.
That is the whole list that can be verified in code. Two of the eight date from 2024 or later. Carlsbad, California, kept a 1998 ban in April 2025 but now allows case-by-case review outside its Village and Barrio; it belongs in a footnote, not the count.
Now the subtractions. Creve Coeur, Missouri, appears on nearly every list circulated since 2019, including NPR’s and CBS’s. Its code lists drive-through service as a conditional use; the city last revised the rules in 2014 and never banned anything. Fair Haven is usually dated to 2019, when the borough introduced two ordinances and then tabled them that September on the Planning Board’s advice; the ban came three years later. Long Beach, California, passed a 2019 moratorium and replaced it with conditional-use findings; it is not a ban. A widely shared “Carmel” zoning PDF that prohibits drive-throughs belongs to the Town of Carmel, New York, not Carmel-by-the-Sea. And a July 2026 article describing a 2025 ban on Hesperian Boulevard in unincorporated Alameda County has the direction backwards: on November 13, 2025, the Board of Supervisors lifted part of a 1999 prohibition and capped the corridor at five drive-ins.
The honest headline, then, is not that cities are banning drive-throughs. It is that eight have, slowly, and that a much larger number are doing something more interesting and harder to summarize.
What “ban” means on the ground
Every one of these ordinances applies to new facilities only. Existing drive-throughs continue as legal nonconforming uses, usually until they sit idle for a year. Minneapolis had already barred drive-throughs in 17 of its 23 primary zoning districts before the 2019 vote. St. Paul’s planning staff counted about 75 drive-through businesses in the city, including 31 of its 40 banks. Salt Lake City grandfathered 12 in the Sugar House district alone when it closed the district to new ones in September 2023. Culver City’s nine will still be pouring shakes in 2028.
A ban, in other words, freezes a city’s drive-through stock roughly where it stands. It does not remove a single lane. Napa, which has been circling a ban since its council denied a Raising Cane’s drive-through 3 to 1 in 2021, had not approved any project with a drive-through since 2014 anyway; a city planner said so on the record.
That changes who the fight is really between. The quiet beneficiaries of a ban are the operators who already hold one. The Starbucks at Snelling and Marshall in St. Paul, nicknamed “Carbucks” for the queue that blocked the intersection, closed its drive-through on its own in 2021 and filed plans for a patio. Nobody made it.
The 2026 playbook: pause and restrict
No American city adopted a new permanent, citywide drive-through ban between January 1 and October 16, 2026. What they adopted instead is a kind of probation.
St. Paul is the clearest case. In September 2024 its Planning Commission recommended, 6 to 5, banning new fast-food and coffee drive-throughs outright. Eighteen months, three drafts and five hearings later, the City Council voted 7 to 0 on March 4, 2026, for something narrower. Ordinance 24-26 bars new drive-through lanes downtown and within 660 feet of any existing or fully funded light-rail, streetcar or bus-rapid-transit station. Everywhere else a drive-through is allowed if the site can stack 14 cars for a coffee shop, 12 for fast food and 6 for a bank or pharmacy, all on the property, up from a four-car minimum, and if customers can walk to the door without crossing the lane. More than a dozen existing operators became nonconforming overnight. The St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce, Retail Minnesota and the city’s Business Review Council said they welcomed the compromise while warning that it “still could create obstacles.”
Spokane chose the moratorium. On April 13, 2026, the council voted 5 to 2 for Emergency Ordinance C36865, a one-year freeze on new drive-throughs, gas stations, car washes and oil-change shops along Division Street and parts of Hamilton, North Monroe and East Sprague, the corridors where a bus-rapid-transit line is due to open in 2030. Council President Betsy Wilkerson voted no over the emergency procedure rather than the policy. “Division is not sudden,” she said. “It’s not unexpected.” The freeze runs to April 2027 while staff draft permanent transit-corridor zoning.
Tucker, Georgia, shows the third pattern: ban by district. After a six-month moratorium in February 2025, the council adopted Ordinance O2025-06-12 that August, 6 to 1. Drive-through restaurants are now prohibited in the downtown DT-2 district and in neighborhood-commercial and mixed-use zones, and need a special land use permit almost everywhere else. The lone dissenter, Councilmember Vinh Nguyen, had wanted the stricter version. Eleven months later the same council approved a drive-through-only 7 Brew coffee stand downtown, 4 to 2, after the applicant added an outdoor seating pavilion.
Atlanta’s 2023 ban applies within the BeltLine overlay, a band roughly a half-mile wide around the 22-mile trail. Salt Lake City’s applies to one business district. Berkeley Township in New Jersey and Calistoga in Napa County prohibit drive-throughs in named zones. Berkley, Massachusetts, requires a special permit and eight stacking spaces for any drive-through at all. This is where the energy is: not the citywide ban, which is rare and politically expensive, but the overlay, the buffer and the queue number.
The cities going the other way
For every council that has tightened the rules since 2024, roughly one has loosened them.
Grand Junction, Colorado, voted unanimously on May 20, 2026, to strike pedestrian-safety and building-frontage requirements from its drive-through code after developers said the rules made projects unbuildable. A city planner told the Planning Commission she “could not find any instances of a pedestrian-vehicle conflict within a drive-through lane in the last 10 years.” Carlsbad, which had banned new drive-throughs since 1998, opened most of the city to case-by-case review in April 2025. Alameda County lifted its 1999 Hesperian Boulevard prohibition in November 2025. Fresno carved an exception for drive-throughs displaced by public-works projects. Fenton, Missouri, amended its residential-buffer rule in August 2026 to allow a drive-through beside homes where an arterial street intervenes or a special use permit is granted.
Tally the adopted actions since January 2024 and the ledger is close to balanced: two new citywide bans, one restriction ordinance, three moratoria, two district ordinances, and four or five loosenings. The drive-through is not being outlawed. It is being negotiated, parcel by parcel, and the negotiation is going both ways.
From waistlines to sidewalks
The first generation of fast-food zoning was about health, and it failed on its own terms. In July 2008 the Los Angeles City Council unanimously restricted new stand-alone fast-food restaurants across roughly 32 square miles of South Los Angeles, citing obesity. Researchers at RAND went back in 2015 and found that overweight and obesity had “increased fastest in the area subject to the fast-food ban.” Seventeen chain outlets had opened in strip malls and food courts anyway. “The South Los Angeles fast food ban may have symbolic value,” the lead author, Roland Sturm, said, “but it has had no measurable impact.”
No council has made the health argument since. The ordinances of 2019 through 2026 cite three things: pedestrians, idling and transit.
The pedestrian case rests on geometry. Drive-throughs cluster on high-speed arterials and push turning cars across sidewalks. Atlanta Councilmember Jason Dozier, sponsoring the BeltLine ban, cited 14 pedestrian deaths and 47 serious injuries near the trail since 2015. The traffic-safety researcher Eric Dumbaugh told CNN that drive-throughs tend to sit in the “exact worse place for them to be.” What the record lacks is a national crash dataset tied specifically to drive-through driveways; nobody keeps one. That may change. In Chick-fil-A v. Ogden, decided this year by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, a trial court ordered the chain to produce five years of pedestrian-incident records from drive-through lanes nationwide, after a two-year-old was killed in a lane in Yukon, Oklahoma, in 2023.
The idling case is real and smaller than its advocates imply. The Department of Energy puts passenger-car idling at 0.2 to 0.5 gallons an hour. The 2026 Intouch Insight–QSR drive-through study, built on 2,145 mystery-shop visits at 13 chains, timed the average visit at 5 minutes 24 seconds, the fastest since 2018. Multiply the two and a typical visit burns somewhere between two and five hundredths of a gallon (Innowave calculation), if the engine never shuts off. St. Paul’s planning manager, Bill Dermody, conceded during the debate that drive-through emissions are “a small part” of the city’s total.
The transit case is the newest and will probably outlast the others, because it does not depend on contested science. A 660-foot radius around a station is simply a statement about what the land near the station is for.
The industry’s card: 65 percent
The restaurant industry’s argument is arithmetic. Revenue Management Solutions, a pricing consultancy, reports that the drive-through carried 65 percent of fast-food sales in 2025, down from a pandemic peak of 83 percent in 2020 but still two-thirds of the business. Researchers at Northwestern’s Kellogg School tracked roughly 17,000 McDonald’s, Starbucks and Dunkin’ locations and found that visits to stores with a drive-through fell 4.43 percent between December 2019 and December 2022. Visits to stores without one fell 48.14 percent. That finding is widely misquoted as a sales figure; it measures visits. The direction is the same.
Operators say it plainer. An attorney for a family that owns several McDonald’s franchises told the St. Paul council that “roughly 75 percent of their business comes from drive-through revenues.” Jonathan Maze, the editor of Restaurant Business, told Twin Cities Business that most drive-through operators “will not open without one.” The St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce said companies “walked away from Saint Paul because they simply couldn’t find locations for drive-thru service.” Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Association, called the bans “shortsighted.”
The harder objection is about who the window serves. “Drive thrus are very important for many people with mobility issues and seniors,” Margot Imdieke Cross of the Minneapolis Advisory Committee on People with Disabilities said in 2019, when the committee formally opposed the city’s ban. In Annapolis the sponsor, Alderman Rob Savidge, testified that under the Americans with Disabilities Act “drive-through windows are a convenience and not a necessity,” and the dissenters cited seniors and residents with limited mobility. Access Press, a Minnesota disability newspaper, noted that disability voices were “notably absent” from the St. Paul debate. Napa’s commissioners discussed exempting pharmacies for exactly this reason.
None of it has stopped a vote. It does explain why so many councils have landed on a buffer rather than a ban.
The courts are splitting the difference
No court has struck down a drive-through ban. The litigation happens one permit at a time, and the record since 2025 is roughly even.
Cities win when they define their terms and write down their reasons. In My Way Realty v. City of Manchester, decided April 14, 2025, the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld a 3-to-2 zoning-board denial of a drive-through, holding that a board may discount even an uncontradicted traffic expert so long as its decision rests on “more than the mere personal opinion of its members.” In Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the Board of Appeals rejected a two-lane Chick-fil-A in Arnold, 4 to 3, on July 16, 2026, on traffic-safety and site-clearing findings.
Developers win when cities skip those steps. Westborough, Massachusetts, denied a Starbucks drive-through 3 to 2 in March 2025 with no stated factual basis; the Land Court sent it back, and the board approved it in November. Schenectady’s code banned an undefined “drive-in service facility,” so a judge hearing an Article 78 challenge read a Starbucks window as a permitted accessory use. In Collierville, Tennessee, a Shelby County chancellor ordered the town on February 23, 2026, to approve a Chick-fil-A it had denied over traffic; the town voted to appeal, the landowner filed contempt petitions against five aldermen, and on July 16 the board approved the site plan and dropped the appeal. In Santa Barbara County, Chick-fil-A won a 5-to-0 approval for a dual-lane store on Calle Real after showing the drive-through would emit no more than a comparable walk-in restaurant, which is the test the county’s own rule sets.
Still open: Los Angeles’s zoning administrator moved in July 2025 to revoke the conditional use permit of a Chick-fil-A in Encino over queuing on Ventura Boulevard; the chain appealed, and no decision has been published. Beacon’s already-approved Dunkin’ sits in limbo because the city attorney reads the new ban as reaching anything not yet out of the ground. Spokane’s emergency procedure has an obvious challenger’s theory and, so far, no challenger.
The drafting lesson repeats in every file. Define “drive-through facility” the way Santa Barbara does. Put the traffic findings in the record. The cities losing in court are losing on paperwork, not policy.
The freeze nobody is counting
The policy spreading fastest in 2026 is not aimed at restaurants.
Warren, Michigan, counted 69 gas stations and 25 car washes inside its 35 square miles and on May 19, 2026, imposed an eight-month moratorium on both, 7 to 0. Neighboring Roseville extended its own freeze by 180 days a week later. Mentor, Ohio, paused car-wash applications for six months on October 6 to study “traffic impacts, vehicle queuing and the concentration of car washes.” Brook Park and Parma Heights, Ohio, now cap car washes at one per 10,000 and one per 12,000 residents. Mission, Texas, adopted a 180-day car-wash moratorium in March and then learned that a state law in effect since September 1, 2025, limits any Texas moratorium to 90 days and bars a repeat on the same ground for two years. Spokane bundled gas stations and car washes with drive-throughs from the start. Napa’s draft may do the same. St. Charles, Illinois, floated a freeze on car washes, gas stations, self-storage, drive-throughs and banks along Route 64 in March; it died for lack of support.
Ohio adds a design mandate. After a woman trapped in a Stow drive-through line was shot and killed in August 2024, State Senator Casey Weinstein introduced SB 264, “Megan’s Way Out,” requiring an escape lane at every new or renovated drive-through. The bill has stalled in committee, but five Ohio towns, Stow, Cuyahoga Falls, Green, Whitehall and, since September, Hartville, have adopted the requirement on their own, and Macedonia requires a bypass lane at least 10 feet wide.
For anyone planning a convenience store, a tunnel wash or a coffee kiosk, this is the live risk. The drive-through ban is rare and slow. The corridor freeze on queue-heavy auto uses is neither, and it comes with a calendar: Roseville’s expires around November 22, 2026; Warren’s around January 19, 2027; Mentor’s and Spokane’s in April 2027; Culver City’s on June 7, 2027, with one more one-year extension available under California law.
What the numbers do to a site plan
Every one of these rules is a dimension, and dimensions decide whether a pad works.
A 12-car stack, at the 20 feet per vehicle most codes assume, is 240 feet of lane. Fourteen cars is 280 (Innowave calculation). On a one-acre outparcel that is the difference between a single lane that fits along the property line and a lane that has to wrap the building, which is why In-N-Out drew two lanes merging into 26 spaces at Studio Village, and why Chick-fil-A’s Calle Real plan holds 31 cars in two lanes against a projected peak queue of 19. A proposal in Palm Springs runs three lanes for 49 vehicles; the Planning Commission sent it back for more traffic analysis.
The buffers are blunter. St. Paul’s 120 feet from a residential district shaves a strip off every neighborhood edge. Long Beach bars new drive-throughs within 500 feet of a school or park without mitigation and limits hours within 150 feet of homes. A 660-foot transit radius takes about 31 acres out of play around each station (Innowave calculation). Tucker’s special-permit requirement turns a by-right use into a hearing, and a hearing into a negotiation over seating.
The workarounds are now a pattern of their own. Tucker approved 7 Brew after it added a pavilion. Walnut Creek approved a Chick-fil-A in May 2024 on the condition that it have no drive-through at all. Portland has required since 2018 that a drive-through serve people on foot or bicycle whenever the lobby is closed. Minneapolis lets businesses mark pickup stalls instead. Chick-fil-A has stopped avoiding contested jurisdictions and started arriving with air-quality modeling; it worked in Santa Barbara County.
The practical advice for a developer in 2026 is to design to St. Paul’s numbers whether or not the city asks for them. Twelve to fourteen stacked cars, no pedestrian path across the lane, and a drawing that shows the queue at its 95th percentile rather than its average will survive a hearing in most of the country. The rest is politics, and politics in this field is currently decided by a die.
The map, as of October 19, 2026
Every row below was checked against the ordinance or code section listed, or against official minutes. Cities that appear on other lists but could not be verified are left off rather than guessed at.
| Jurisdiction | State | Action | Adopted | Authority | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Santa Barbara | CA | Citywide ban | 1979 | SBMC §28.87.240; §30.185.160 | New or expanded drive-throughs |
| San Luis Obispo | CA | Citywide ban | Jan. 7, 1983 | Ord. 941 (1982 Series) | All zones |
| Petaluma | CA | Citywide ban | 2008 | General Plan 2025; IZO Ch. 4 use tables | Drive-through retail and service |
| Sebastopol | CA | Citywide ban | Jan. 2015 | SMC §17.08.060 | All drive-through uses |
| Minneapolis | MN | Citywide ban | Aug. 17, 2019 | Zoning amendment; §541.390 | Restaurants, banks, pharmacies |
| Fair Haven | NJ | Citywide ban | Oct. 11, 2022 | Ord. 2022-15 | Drive-through and fast-food restaurants |
| Annapolis | MD | Citywide ban | Dec. 9, 2024 | O-6-24 | New drive-through windows |
| Beacon | NY | Citywide ban | May 5, 2025 | Local Law 4 of 2025 | All drive-through facilities |
| Carlsbad | CA | Ban, case-by-case since Apr. 29, 2025 | 1998 | Municipal code | Village and Barrio stay closed |
| Atlanta | GA | District ban | Aug. 2023 | BeltLine Overlay | About ½ mile of the trail |
| Salt Lake City | UT | District ban | Sept. 5, 2023 | CSHBD1/CSHBD2 | Sugar House |
| Tucker | GA | District ban and permit | Aug. 11, 2025 | O2025-06-12 | Prohibited in DT-2 and mixed-use zones |
| St. Paul | MN | Transit and downtown ban, stacking minimums | Mar. 4, 2026 | Ord. 24-26 | 660 ft of stations; 14/12/6 cars |
| Calistoga | CA | District ban | In code | CMC §17.22.050 | Community Commercial zone |
| Orchard Park (Town) | NY | District ban | Sept. 4, 2019 | Architectural Overlay District | N. and S. Buffalo St. |
| Long Beach | CA | Conditional use | 2019 | LBMC §21.45.130; ORD-19-0016 | Findings; 500 ft from schools and parks |
| Culver City | CA | Moratorium | Jun. 8, 2026 | Interim urgency ordinance, Gov. Code §65858 | Expires Jun. 7, 2027 |
| Spokane | WA | Moratorium | Apr. 13, 2026 | Emergency Ord. C36865 | Transit corridors; expires Apr. 2027 |
| Napa | CA | Proposed ban | PC Jul. 16, 2026 | Zoning ordinance update | Council date not set |
| Grand Junction | CO | Loosened | May 20, 2026 | Code amendment | Pedestrian-safety rules removed |
| Alameda County | CA | Loosened | Nov. 13, 2025 | PLN2024-00067 | Hesperian Blvd.; cap of five |
What to watch next: Culver City’s Planning Commission must recommend a permanent ordinance, or something short of one, before the June 2027 deadline; Councilmember Albert Vera has said he is open to alternatives to a citywide ban. Napa’s council has not scheduled the zoning update that carries its ban. Spokane’s permanent transit-corridor zoning is due before April 2027. Ohio’s SB 264 dies on December 31 if the Senate does not act. The Encino revocation and the Arnold Chick-fil-A appeal window are the two permit fights most likely to produce a published decision. This table will be refreshed each quarter and after any council vote that changes a row.
How this map was built
Each entry was traced to a code section, ordinance PDF, agenda packet, court order or official minutes, and dated from that document rather than from news coverage. Where a vote count exists only in secondary reporting it is omitted. The count excludes Canada. Reporters and planners are welcome to cite the table with a link to this page; corrections with a primary source attached will be incorporated at the next update.
Primary sources
St. Paul Legistar, Ord. 24-26 and Planning Commission Resolution 24-27
Spokane Official Gazette, Apr. 22, 2026 (Emergency Ord. C36865)
Salt Lake City Planning staff report, Sugar House drive-through amendment
Alameda County Board of Supervisors planning agenda, Nov. 13, 2025
RAND, “No Evidence That Los Angeles Fast-Food Curbs Have Improved Diets or Cut Obesity” (2015)
U.S. Department of Energy, idling reduction for personal vehicles
Reporting relied on
LAist on Culver City’s extension; Culver City Crossroads on the dice roll
Fox 9 and the Villager on St. Paul
The Daily Memphian on Collierville; Severna Park Voice on Arnold; Community Advocate on Westborough
CNN, “Why cities want to ban new drive-thrus” (2023); QSR Magazine on Minneapolis (2019)