How Drive-Thru Stacking Quietly Replaced the Parking Minimum

In April 2025, Chick-fil-A asked the Richardson, Texas city council for permission to add a third drive-thru lane at 110 West Campbell Road. The expansion would raise the line's capacity from 16 cars to 27. It also required buying three feet of additional land to the north, which triggered a new subdivision filing: back to planning commission, back to council.

The store is already built. The chicken sandwich is already famous. The expansion was about the line, not the menu.

Eleven months later, St. Paul, Minnesota finished a three-year drive-thru debate by writing the line into law. On March 4, 2026, the City Council unanimously passed an ordinance setting minimum on-site stacking by use type: 14 cars for coffee shops, 12 for fast food, 6 for pharmacies and banks. Stacking is the number of cars a drive-thru must hold without spilling into the street. New drive-thrus are also barred within one-eighth mile of bus rapid transit and light-rail stations and can't be added to stand-alone buildings.

A month after that, Spokane, Washington shut the question on four corridors at once. On April 13, 2026, the City Council voted 5-2 to impose an emergency moratorium along Division Street, Hamilton Street, N. Monroe Street, and E. Sprague Avenue. The ordinance was added to the agenda the Friday before the Monday vote, runs through April 2027, and also covers gas stations and car washes. Brad Barnett of the Spokane Business Association called it "a cloak-and-dagger assault on working families and entrepreneurs in Spokane."

Three cities, three different rules, one constraint.

Parking-minimum repeal didn't free retail pads. It exposed the regulatory layer underneath. Drive-thru stacking rules, residential setbacks, and corridor-wide drive-thru bans now control retail-pad geometry more tightly than parking minimums ever did. Site selectors who still treat the drive-thru line as a routine traffic check are getting blindsided by ordinances that use it as the deciding factor.

The Stacking Table

St. Paul's ordinance is the clearest example of a city legislating the line itself. Coffee shops need 14 spaces because coffee orders take longer than fast-food orders. Fast food gets 12. Pharmacies and banks get 6 because their windows clear quickly. A small lot that looks workable on paper for a coffee shop will fail the 14-space check before engineering drawings begin.

The transit prohibition does the other half of the work. If transit access is the reason cities stopped requiring parking, then drive-thrus, which only serve cars, shouldn't claim the same land. The stand-alone-building ban closes the loop: a drive-thru can attach to a multi-tenant building, but a freestanding coffee shop on its own lot is no longer allowed.

For reasons covered in the Austin parking-minimum analysis, repealing the headline parking ratio rarely changes how much pavement a site needs. Fire access, accessible routes, and drive aisles keep the asphalt where it was. The number that governs the site isn't the parking count anymore. It's the line count.

The Setback Cousin

On May 6, 2025, McKinney, Texas raised the required distance between new drive-thrus and any single-family residential zone from 20 feet to 200 feet. A tenfold increase. The vote was 5-1. The setback drops to 150 feet if the property is separated from homes by a public street or if the city grants a specific use permit. Interim Planning Director Hayley Angel said 15 existing drive-thrus become "legal nonconforming." They can keep operating but can't expand under the new rule.

The exchange captured the design. Council member Michael Jones, the lone dissent: "I feel like we're creating problems that don't really exist now for the future." Council member Geré Feltus, in favor: "I'd much rather lean into protecting the residents at this point and then having these folks come in and just apply for the variances."

The variance, a case-by-case waiver, is the path the council expects every applicant to walk. A 200-foot setback turns site selection into a residential-distance triage step at the deal stage, not at design review.

Worth flagging alongside McKinney: Texas House Bill 2559, effective September 1, 2025, set new procedural rules for municipal moratoria: two public hearings 30 days apart, a three-fourths council vote, 90-day expiration, 180-day cap. Texas cities that might once have reached for a moratorium now reach for a setback amendment instead. The lever changes; the binding effect doesn't. Mesa, Arizona passed a 100-foot residential setback in October 2023, before parking-minimum repeal reached most planning departments. The signal was already there.

The Coffee Box's Public-Street Problem

Coffee shops are the central case. Slow orders plus tiny buildings produce lines that don't fit on the small lots the chains typically buy. Dutch Bros and 7 Brew show up in meeting minutes because their model of small drive-thru-only buildings in dense networks runs the line-on-the-street risk hot.

"Our biggest challenge is line management." That was Joth Ricci, then-CEO of Dutch Bros, at the ICR Conference in Orlando on January 12, 2023, defending the chain's strategy of opening dense clusters of stores to shorten queues. Operators know what their lines do.

In Naperville, Illinois, a Dutch Bros proposed at 1230 S. Naper Boulevard sat on a 0.46-acre lot, with the line projected to spill onto an arterial. At the October 7, 2025 hearing, traffic plan administrator Kyle Dallas walked the council through queue scenarios. Mayor Scott Wehrli said the company's remote-controlled vehicle corralling system was something the city had never seen before. On November 4, 2025, the council voted unanimously to table the application indefinitely at the applicant's own request, once the queue math wasn't going to clear.

In Glasgow, Kentucky, it was the state department of transportation (DOT) that did the binding. On December 15, 2025, the Joint City-County Planning Commission denied a zone change at 1000 West Main Street by 9-1, but the underlying barrier was the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet refusing new entrances on West Main. Chief District Engineer Joe Plunk: "No new entrances would be allowed on West Main Street or S.L. Rogers Wells Boulevard." Police Chief Guy Howie reported 52 crashes at the intersection in 2025. The state's access decision shut the circulation the prototype needed; the planning commission vote was the formality.

In Moses Lake, Washington, Dutch Bros went the other direction. On March 25, 2026, the operator filed an applicant-initiated redesign at 121 and 125 N. Stratford Road, turning an adjacent gravel lot into a looped drive lane to pull the line off Stratford Street and out of the neighboring Walgreens parking lot. Stacking overflow had been bad enough that Dutch Bros paused merchandise drops at the location. Either way, the queue rebuilt the site.

In Boise, Idaho, 7 Brew filed on May 11, 2026 to convert a former Trophy Car Wash at 8160 W. Overland Road. The site is zoned MX-2, Boise's most permissive mixed-use designation, and yet the code bans drive-thru windows facing the street in MX-2, which the prototype requires. The most permissive zone in the city still binds the prototype.

The Moratorium Window

Tucker, Georgia ran the full lifecycle in six months. On February 10, 2025, the City Council added a six-month drive-thru moratorium to the agenda during the meeting itself and passed it 7-0. On August 11, 2025, the council adopted the permanent ordinance: drive-thrus automatic in C-2 (General Commercial) only, case-by-case Special Land Use Permit review in three other districts.

The Dutch Bros at 4545 Hugh Howell Road, on the site of a former Sonic, was already in permitting when the February moratorium passed and was exempted. It opened in late 2025. The moratorium did not stop that project. It stopped the next ones. The window is a timing variable: a project two weeks ahead of the gavel clears; a project two weeks behind sits for six months and re-enters under a different rule.

Spokane's emergency moratorium is the same mechanic with faster turnaround: posted Friday, voted Monday. Council Member Michael Cathcart, dissenting: "At the end of the day, I think we need to allow the market to work." Council President Betsy Wilkerson also dissented but backed the concept, objecting only to the emergency designation. Outright opposition to drive-thru regulation is now a minority position even among the dissenters.

In Santa Barbara, the constraint took a different form. The city's grandfathered Chick-fil-A, a former Burger King in a city that has banned new drive-thrus for 40 years, produced a 155-minute travel-lane queue documented in a 2022 joint report by the city's traffic engineer, police chief, and community development director. The council voted in June 2022 for a traffic management plan rather than a public nuisance declaration. Council member Kristen Sneddon said the location had "outgrown" its site. A grandfathered drive-thru in a city that ended the form four decades ago became the city's own enforcement problem.

For Developers and Land-Use Practitioners

Four tools do the same work: use-typed stacking minimums, residential setbacks, corridor moratoria, and conditional-use or zone-change denials. They bind drive-thru line geometry to where a store can go. A site selector who watches only one is watching a quarter of the field.

Stacking and setback analysis belongs at the letter of intent (LOI) stage, not after the architect lays out the site. When the ordinance specifies 14 stacking spaces for a coffee use, the lot geometry needs to show 14 spaces before the LOI is signed. The downstream traffic memo isn't a check on the deal; it confirms what the deal already accounts for.

The watch list has to span all four tools. A jurisdiction with no stacking minimum and no moratorium can still bind a coffee prototype through a residential setback amendment or a conditional-use denial. Glasgow shows the state DOT lever sitting under all of it. Where the corridor is a state route, access management can shut the geometry before zoning weighs in. The binding constraint is rarely the one named in the project brief, and the constraint that binds is the one that interacts with the others.

Geographic clustering is real but uneven. Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Washington, Minnesota, Illinois, Idaho, Kentucky, and California are all represented in the case set above. The pattern isn't uniformly national, but it crosses enough markets that any retail tenant running a multi-state development pipeline needs the four-tool watch list as a standing input.

The Queue Is the New Parking Lot

Cities scrapped the parking minimum to let urban land do something other than store cars. The drive-thru, by definition, can't help with that. So planners and councils are improvising. St. Paul wrote a stacking table. McKinney moved the setback. Spokane shut the corridor. Tucker tried a moratorium and then made it permanent. None of these cities coordinated. They are all answering the same question in different words, and the answer keeps coming out the same: no more drive-thrus that don't fit.

There are two things worth taking away.

First, zoning approval is no longer the deciding question on a drive-thru pad site. The line is. A pad can clear the zoning, clear the setback, and clear the moratorium window, and still fail because the queue doesn't fit. That failure happens at the front of the deal, before the architect draws a thing. The question on the next pad site is no longer "does this site allow a drive-thru." It is "does the line fit, and does it fit on the day this council votes."

Second, the four tools are interchangeable. A city that hasn't written a stacking minimum can bind the same prototype through a setback amendment, a moratorium, or a state DOT access decision. A retail tenant tracking one of the four is tracking a quarter of the field, and the field is moving. Tucker, McKinney, St. Paul, Mesa, Spokane, Glasgow, Naperville, Boise, Moses Lake, Richardson, Santa Barbara. Add a city a month, and the inventory grows on its own.

Fifteen cars in a line take up the same asphalt either way. The cities have figured that out. The deal teams underwriting the next round of drive-thru pads have to figure it out too, or they will keep buying lots that the line won't fit on.