Pleasant Ridge approves 6-month moratorium on drive-thrus

PLEASANT RIDGE — A moratorium on drive-thru facilities in Pleasant Ridge has been approved by the City Commission.

At its Aug. 9 meeting, the commission took up a resolution to place a six-month moratorium on drive-thru facilities in the city while the Planning Commission studies the issue and potentially comes up with an ordinance that would regulate drive-thrus.

There currently is nothing on the books within Pleasant Ridge’s zoning ordinance regarding drive-thrus. With recent discussions of development on Woodward Avenue and the impact that a drive-thru can have on the roadway, the decision was made to bring a moratorium to the table.

City Manager James Breuckman stated at the meeting that the recently approved Skymint marijuana facility, which did not ask for a drive-thru, sharpened the city’s focus on Woodward and the potential for redevelopment to impact traffic and Pleasant Ridge. A big concern he cited was the thought of something like a Starbucks, such as the one at 13 Mile Road and Woodward, coming in and backing up traffic like it does at that location.

“That is something that doesn’t put 120 people a day through the site. It puts 60 people an hour or more through the site,” he said.

As there is nothing in the ordinance, Breuckman said that if a business did come and request a drive-thru, it would be a problem because the city wouldn’t know how to proceed.

“It doesn’t mean it’s prohibited, so if somebody comes in, we don’t even have standards to review it against,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of interesting things going on with our stretch of Woodward … and it’s hard to see one of those fitting in well here.”

There are only a couple of drive-thrus in Pleasant Ridge, such as a bank and an oil-service facility, though both weren’t considered as having the same impact as a Starbucks would on Woodward.

Breuckman said another issue to consider is that drive-thrus have a big impact on multimodal streetscapes because instead of having no driveways, there usually would now be two driveways, and driveways add extra conflict points for bike lanes and pedestrians.

“All you have to do is walk Woodward and, you know, where you have those drive-thrus, is it as comfortable of a pedestrian experience walking through the drive-thrus versus walking in front of a business where there’s no driveways?” he said. “One of the things I would want all of us to keep in mind is if we’re, you know, looking at expanding the number of drive-thrus in the community while we’re adding bike lanes along Woodward and doing those things to be a more human-walkable scale, drive-thrus are the opposite of that. It’s adding more of a car scale to the streetscape.”

The commission unanimously approved the resolution. Mayor Bret Scott said the city wants to get control of this issue so that it does not become a problem in the future.

“We have actually a number of empty buildings right now along Woodward, and they could become anything,” he said. “Rather than become something that becomes an issue for us and, as we talked about Skymint, all of us pointed out Starbucks on Woodward, it’s just at certain times of the day a nightmare, and we don’t want that in Pleasant Ridge.”