A small California city just south of Los Angeles has extended its moratorium on new drive-thru construction into next year, a move the restaurant industry says amounts to a stealth ban on quick-service dining.
Culver City's council voted to stretch what began as a 45-day freeze on drive-thru permits into a longer hold, buying time to convert an existing downtown drive-thru ban into a citywide prohibition. The extension means no new drive-thru lanes can break ground anywhere in the city for months, and the council has signaled it intends to make the restriction permanent. McDonald's, In-N-Out Burger, and every other chain that depends on the window are caught in the crosshairs.
The freeze carries real commercial weight. Roughly 70 percent of all fast food orders in the United States come through the drive-thru, The U.S. Sun reported, citing the American Planning Association. For quick-service operators, a drive-thru lane is not a convenience feature, it is the business model. Eliminating it does not reshape a restaurant; it removes the mechanism that generates most of its revenue.
The most visible casualty so far is In-N-Out Burger. The chain had drawn up plans for a Culver City location that included 61 parking spaces and a drive-thru lane long enough to stack 26 vehicles. A city staff report noted the project would have been the first new drive-thru in Culver City since 1997, nearly three decades without a single new lane.
In-N-Out had not submitted a formal permit application when the first moratorium passed, according to LAist. Whether the chain has filed since remains unclear. A spokesperson gave LAist a one-line brush-off.
"As a private, family-owned company, we generally don't comment publicly on business matters."
The company did not immediately return The U.S. Sun's request for comment either. That silence leaves open whether In-N-Out plans to fight the ban, redesign its proposal without a drive-thru, or simply walk away from Culver City altogether. The chain's leadership has previously signaled a deliberate approach to expansion, prioritizing quality control over rapid growth.
Culver City Councilmember Bubba Fish offered the rationale behind the push. He said the city needs to create what he described as "more walkable, bikeable, safer streets for people of all modes," and called drive-throughs "the antithesis of that."
It is a familiar line from urban planning circles: cars bad, pedestrians good, and any business built around automobile access is a problem to be solved rather than a service people actually want. Fish's framing treats the 70 percent of fast food customers who use drive-thrus not as consumers making a rational choice but as participants in a design failure the government must correct.
The California Restaurant Association sees it differently. Jot Condie, the group's president, told Fox Business the bans are "shortsighted" and laid out the practical consequence plainly.
"You're essentially banning quick-service restaurants without specifically stating that."
Condie's point is hard to argue with on the math. If seven out of ten orders come through the window, eliminating the window does not produce a walkable café, it produces a business that cannot cover its overhead. The council is not regulating drive-thrus. It is regulating them out of existence.
Culver City is not acting alone. Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, both located north of Los Angeles, have maintained citywide drive-thru bans for decades. But the trend is accelerating.
Napa, the tourist hub in California's wine country, is weighing its own drive-thru ban focused on restaurants. Officials there are considering extending the restriction beyond food service to dry cleaners, car washes, and pharmacy windows, a scope that would touch daily errands far beyond a burger run. The city of Napa's proposal represents one of the broadest versions of the policy under consideration anywhere in the state.
San Diego is also considering a measure to halt construction of all new drive-thrus. The city tried once before; a similar ban failed there in 2021. Whether the political climate has shifted enough to push it through this time remains an open question.
The pattern is clear: California's progressive city councils are adopting the same restriction one municipality at a time, each citing some version of walkability, sustainability, or urban design. None of them appear to be asking the residents who actually use drive-thrus whether they want the option removed. Culver City's own earlier deliberations on the ban drew attention precisely because the target was so transparent, a beloved burger chain with a proposal already on the table.
The 1997 detail from the city staff report deserves a second look. Culver City has not permitted a single new drive-thru in nearly 30 years. The moratorium and proposed permanent ban are not interventions against a building boom. They are the final bolt on a door that has been effectively shut for a generation.
That timeline raises a question the council has not publicly answered: if no drive-thru has been built since Bill Clinton's second term, what urgent problem does a permanent citywide ban solve? The answer appears to be In-N-Out's proposal, a specific project the council wanted stopped before it could clear the permit process.
Meanwhile, the fast food industry continues to invest in drive-thru infrastructure elsewhere. Taco Bell recently expanded AI-powered drive-thru ordering across hundreds of locations nationwide, a sign that the rest of the country views the drive-thru not as an urban planning relic but as a channel worth upgrading with new technology.
And other chains are betting on California's market even as the regulatory environment tightens. Freddy's Frozen Custard announced plans for 60 new California restaurants, a gamble that consumer demand in the state still outweighs the growing burden of local regulation.
Several basic details remain missing from the public record. The council has not disclosed whether the moratorium applies retroactively to pending applications or only to future ones. It has not laid out the specific legislative process or vote threshold required to convert the temporary freeze into a permanent citywide ordinance. And no timeline has been given for when that permanent ban would take effect beyond the vague commitment to extend the moratorium "into next year."
McDonald's, named in reporting as one of the affected chains, has not issued any public statement on the ban. Whether the company has active development plans in Culver City, or has quietly shelved them, is unknown.
Condie's criticism on behalf of the California Restaurant Association stands as the most direct industry pushback on the record. But the restaurant lobby faces a structural disadvantage: each ban is a local zoning decision, not a statewide law, which means fighting it requires showing up city by city, council meeting by council meeting, while progressive planners coordinate a shared template.
When 70 percent of your customers come through the drive-thru and the government decides to wall it off, that is not urban planning, it is a policy choice to tell millions of people that the way they prefer to eat is no longer welcome.