For a time in the 1980s I lived in Julian, California, a small town high in the mountains east of San Diego. The last town of any size on the road, 22 miles before Julian, is Ramona, an agricultural community with a wide main street reminiscent of “Gunsmoke” and “High Noon.” It’s the last agglomeration of fast-food restaurants and chain grocery stores before the highway heads up over the mountains and into the desert beyond.
There was a chicken farm not far from Ramona, before the road begins to climb in earnest. Eggs were sold from a little shack in a generous dirt pull-off next to the highway. It was a good place to stop, stretch your legs, and pick up some eggs before negotiating the last miles of winding mountain road on the long drive from the populated cities near the coast.
I remember when they installed drive-thru service. It cracked me up, because the farm was in the middle of nowhere, and who was in a hurry to get to Julian? But you could now drive around the back of the shack, buy your farm-fresh eggs like a cheeseburger, and continue along your merry way without ever getting out of the car.
Forty years later, it still seems funny to me. But it was a harbinger of things to come. Two years ago, I wrote about being unable to get a cup of coffee in the lobby of a Dunkin’ Donuts while a line of cars waited at the drive-thru. In Bangor and Rockland, Dunkin’ franchises post signs warning drivers not to block the street when the drive-thru backs up. Meanwhile, inside space and service has diminished as customers opt to wait in a line of cars rather than people.
Dunkin’ Donuts was once a friendly place instead of an ATM for good coffee and cheap food. There was a Dunkin’ in Ellsworth on the corner of Main and High Street, and people would gather before work in the mornings to drink coffee from thick-walled mugs, and to talk with fellow human beings instead of ordering into an impersonal speaker. It’s long gone now, of course, replaced by an out-of-town pit stop a couple miles away with a larger footprint, a smaller seating area, and a wrap-around line for cars. No one arrives on foot, and no one talks to one another.
We live in Drive-Thru Nation now. Banking, prescriptions, eggs – you name it, you can likely get it through a car window. Is this a good thing? Perhaps if you’ve got five minutes to get to work and you’ve forgotten to eat breakfast and you’re willing to wait in your car as if you’re stopped for road construction, it might seem convenient. But why are we all running around in such a hurry in the first place, to the point where we can’t take the time for the small personal interactions that help sustain communities?
From the public expectation of free parking (I prefer to call it “socialized parking”), to the Wal-Martization of towns that once boasted an array of small and varied businesses, the destructive costs of our car-driven lifestyles are both widely apparent and widely accepted.
But what if customers had to pay an extra dollar at Dunkin’ Donuts and the Ramona egg farm to use the drive-thru? Would drivers still flock to them? Or would they take the incentive to re-connect, if only for a few minutes, with their fellow citizens?
The dollars could go toward public transportation, bike paths, downtown green spaces and walkable commercial zones. They could fund infrastructure that steers the incentives away from the isolation of cars toward the inclusion of community.
For the past three-quarters of a century, the United States has promoted cars and built transportation systems almost exclusively for car owners. Business and government have been equally complicit. It’s time to have a national conversation about this, over a cup of coffee that hasn’t been passed through a car window.
