SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — The city of Santa Barbara, California, is considering declaring a Chick-fil-A restaurant in the city a public nuisance because of the traffic it creates with its drive-thru lanes.
Chick-fil-A, a popular chicken fast-food chain across the U.S., has had one restaurant in Santa Barbara since 2013, CBS News reported. That single location brings in a lot of customers, whose vehicles block driveways and sidewalks.
Santa Barbara has been talking to the location’s operator for years, and in 2020, recommended the restaurant hire a security firm to manage traffic, The Los Angeles Times reported.
A memo from the city’s public works department in January documented the traffic issues that have city officials concerned about safety. The memorandum said that the lines from Chick-fil-A’s drive-thru block lanes of traffic for an average of 70 minutes a day on weekdays and 92 minutes per day on Saturdays: “In addition to the negative effects on mobility, queuing into the street increases the risk of collisions, particularly rear-end collisions and side-swipe collisions … Drivers were also observed getting stuck in the queue because they were unable to change lanes.”
Chick-fil-A Memorandum by National Content Desk on Scribd
“This is not about the goodness of the company or the goodness of the owners and certainly not about the goodness of the employees,” Santa Barbara City Councilmember Kristen Sneddon told The Los Angeles Times. “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.”
In their meeting with Chick-fil-A on March 1, the city council agreed to give the company 90 days to present its solutions before voting on whether to designate the site as a public nuisance, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Chick-fil-A has tried to address the problem by adding extra drive-thru lanes, encouraging online ordering, and having a third-party firm to help direct traffic, The Los Angeles Times reported. In a statement, the company told the newspaper, “At our very core, Chick-fil-A strives to serve not only our guests but our communities at large.”
There are very few businesses with drive-thrus in Santa Barbara because the city prohibited them more than 40 years ago, but Chick-fil-A was grandfathered into its location, which was previously a Burger King with a drive-thru, CBS News reported.
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