The Stack Was Never the Problem: Coffee Drive-Thrus Are Losing on the Driveway

On October 5, 2026, the Elgin, Illinois Planning and Zoning Commission took up a double-lane coffee drive-thru at 1039–1047 Summit Street. The applicant had done what recent stacking fights taught the industry to do.

The city's public notice describes a 1,083-square-foot building with no indoor seating on about an acre. It stacks 43 vehicles against an expected grand-opening peak of 38. "The City of Elgin's transportation engineering consultant has reviewed and approved the traffic impact study," the notice says.

The commission voted 4-3 not to recommend it, Hoodline reported. Hoodline described the concerns as drive-through traffic volume and "the neighborhood's capacity to absorb it."

One line further down, the city's notice says where that traffic would go: "The property will have one full access driveway to Shady Oaks Drive and no direct access to Summit Street." Shady Oaks is a residential street.

That's the pattern running through these small coffee pad hearings. In Elgin, stack and study both passed, and the project still ran aground on where the driveway lands.

When the arterial curb cut is off the table, the workable access goes onto a side street. Then the commission is voting on who lives with the turning movements.

A capacity study doesn't answer that question. Access belongs in site selection, settled before the letter of intent (LOI). At the hearing it's too late.

The industry learned the stacking lesson. The queue replaced the parking minimum as the number that binds a drive-thru pad.

Applicants now over-provide stacking and commission clean traffic studies, betting both protect the vote. Elgin had five spare cars of stack and a consultant-approved study. It lost the commission vote anyway.

The Question the Traffic Study Doesn't Answer

The next night, October 6, the Homewood, Alabama Planning Commission heard a 986-square-foot coffee drive-thru with a walk-up window. The 0.61-acre lot sits at 832 Green Springs Highway, on the corner of Raleigh Avenue.

There were two requests. The commission voted 6-0 to recommend cutting a landscape buffer from 20 feet to 10, according to The Homewood Star. Then it voted 4-2 against full two-way access to Raleigh Avenue.

The access vote did not turn on the delay headline. Brian Hatcher of Kadre Engineering, the developer's engineer, presented a traffic study that found delays on Raleigh would rise by no more than a second or two per vehicle. A commissioner pointed out that the same study put the average wait for left turns out of the site at 47 seconds.

The developer said full access to Raleigh was necessary for the project to work.

City staff noted that, from a traffic engineering standpoint, full access at a driveway feeding a signalized intersection is usually preferred. Drivers can reach the light and turn left onto Green Springs instead of being pushed into the neighborhood.

So the commission voted down the layout staff said traffic engineers usually prefer. It wasn't misreading the study. It was answering a different question.

A traffic impact study measures capacity: seconds of delay per vehicle, level of service, queue length at the window. It's built to tell a city whether the network can carry the trips.

A commission looking at a driveway onto a residential street is asking who carries them, and past whose house at the morning peak. A second or two of delay is a true number and a non-responsive one.

Studies aren't built to reach that question. In the Town of Wappinger, New York, the applicant's engineer reviewed a two-lane coffee drive-thru at 1506 US Route 9 in a traffic operations letter.

The letter notes that a median limits the northern driveway to right-out only. It treats that as a given and concludes there is "no notable or significant impact."

The Planning Board scheduled the site plan for an August 17, 2026 vote. Whatever it decided, the letter is a fair specimen of the form. It takes the access geometry as fixed and measures what's left. The question a commission argues about starts where that measurement stops.

How the Driveway Ends Up on the Neighbors' Street

State DOTs push small pads onto side streets on a principle older than the drive-thru coffee boom. AASHTO guidance, quoted in the Federal Highway Administration's 2018 corner-clearance study, holds that "driveways should not be located within the functional area of an at-grade intersection or in the influence area of an adjacent driveway."

Prior research summarized in the report tied more corner clearance and fewer access points to fewer crashes. On a one-acre corner lot along a state arterial, the functional area of the intersection can swallow most of the frontage.

The arterial cut goes away or shrinks to right-in/right-out. Whatever access is left lands on the street along the back or side of the pad.

Westland, Michigan shows how a DOT position, even one reported secondhand, moves the driveway. At the July 1, 2025 Planning Commission meeting, the petitioner proposed a 664-square-foot drive-through-only coffee building at 35966 Ford Road, with access on North Berry Street.

The minutes record that Planning Director Mohamed Ayoub found the proposed Berry curb cut "burdensome for the residents." They also record the city's belief that an existing Ford Road curb cut "could be repurposed."

Per the minutes, the petitioner said MDOT had told it the existing curb cut wouldn't be approved. That was why the entrance moved to Berry.

The city's planning director walked into the hearing believing the arterial driveway might be reusable. The applicant said it had already been told it wasn't.

Ayoub described staff's contact with the state as "limited conversations (one email and a brief phone conversation) with MDOT."

The residents who spoke were talking about the driveway. Berry Street resident John Shaffer raised cut-through traffic, delayed left turns, and "many children on the street."

He said he was "hard-pressed to think of any businesses in the area that enter and exit off a residential street, especially a high volume drive-thru." Commissioner Reed, who made the motion, put it this way: "We want you in Westland, but we have to weigh the pros and cons for the neighbors."

The commission voted 9-0 to forward the case to City Council with a recommendation to table it until the next meeting. The pause was meant to let the administration work with the petitioner to "exhaust all conversations and options with MDOT" and look at other sites.

Crystal Lake, Illinois shows the state and the city closing the arterial frontages together. A coffee drive-thru proposed for a former bank building at 5999 Northwest Highway ended up with a single driveway on Heritage Drive.

Community Development Director Kathryn Cowlin said the Illinois Department of Transportation would "never permit an access on Route 14," the Northwest Herald reported in March. The city didn't want an access point on Main Street either.

In Glasgow, Kentucky, the state transportation cabinet said it would allow no new entrances on either frontage. That case is in our piece on why the queue replaced the parking minimum.

Residential setback rules don't catch this. A distance standard like McKinney's 200-foot drive-thru setback measures from the lane to the house. It says nothing about the driveway that routes every car in the queue past that house.

Commission Versus Council

A commission loss isn't the end of the site.

In February 2026 the Crystal Lake Planning and Zoning Commission voted 5-2 to recommend denial, the Northwest Herald reported. The commission cited traffic and the "restrictive" size of the parcel.

The plan's only access point was off Heritage Drive. Commissioner Jeff Greenman said traffic there would worsen as the nearby Water's Edge development filled in.

On March 3, 2026, the City Council approved the project unanimously. The change the Herald reported was architecture: a blue tower became slate gray brick.

The access plan didn't move. City staff had predicted no negative traffic impact, and the site carried 29 stacking spaces.

The sequence isn't new. Springfield, Missouri ran it in 2022. A coffee drive-thru at Sunshine Street and South Jefferson Avenue had no access on Sunshine, where an elementary school sits across the street.

Access came off Jefferson Avenue, with a Roanoke Avenue driveway planned for a second phase. City staff recommended approval because intersection capacity was adequate.

The Planning and Zoning Commission recommended denial three times in 2022, starting in March, the Springfield Daily Citizen reported. Commissioner Chris Lebeck: "We have a business that's going to potentially stack 26 cars at a time in what looks like NASCAR, we've got three cars wide next to a drive-thru coffee shop."

A split City Council approved it 5-3 in January 2023.

Both reversals cost the applicant time. Crystal Lake took about two weeks and a second hearing. Springfield took about ten months, from the first commission denial in March 2022 to council approval in January 2023.

That's the real price of a contested site: a second hearing on the same plan, and weeks to most of a year on the schedule. Redesign risk rides on whoever shows up.

Elgin's and Homewood's commission votes are advisory, and both projects now go to their city councils. Neither report gives a council date.

Before You Sign the LOI

Stacking is table stakes now. Pads get sorted on access, and most of that read can happen before a site is under contract.

Start by finding out who controls the curb cut on each frontage. On a state route that's usually the DOT, and the city's view of the site doesn't settle it.

Then assume the arterial gives you right-in/right-out or nothing, and test-fit the pad on that. The Homewood developer said full access to Raleigh was necessary for the project to work. If your layout only works with the driveway you're hoping for, it doesn't work yet.

Get the DOT's position in writing before the LOI. Westland's planning director and the applicant walked into the same hearing believing different things about the Ford Road curb cut. The commission ended up recommending a pause so the city could go back to MDOT.

Look at who lives on the side street where the driveway would land. Elgin's only driveway went onto Shady Oaks, a residential street, and the concerns Hoodline reported came down to the neighborhood's capacity to absorb the traffic.

If houses line that street, carry a council hearing in the schedule. Getting from commission to council took about two weeks in Crystal Lake. In Springfield it took about ten months.

The same read applies to the express car washes bidding on the same corner lots.

If the only workable driveway runs past houses, price in the council vote before you sign the LOI.